Hayward’s Reach

Hunger

Posted by Ebonstorm on May 6, 2015
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, science fiction, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , . 1 Comment

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“After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.” — Ernest Shackleton

A Tale of Hayward’s Reach

It tore at her as a ravenous beast might; the hunger. She had never believed it could hurt so. Was this what it was like to be so near to dissolution? This tenuous feeling that she might be flying apart, her molecules, thinner than gossamer, forced to feed. She was the thickness of a butterfly’s wing; a wisp floating in space.

She was weak, so weak that she could only consider the unthinkable, a blind jump to the nearest star and hope there might be food there. Hunger had not been something she had been accustomed to having grown up near the center of the galaxy, within the blazing confines of the galactic core. So beautiful, stars everywhere, light constantly bombarding her every surface, so bright, she was forced to condense herself and reflect light. Her neural network fluttered with the idea, light so abundant she could return it to space, uneaten.

Her current form, adapted for dark space travel was large, millions of miles across, diaphanous, and absorptive, capturing every stray photon, every bit of random hydrogen, every fragment of solar wind. But the pitiful scattering of radiation from stars in this portion of the galaxy would never be able to support one such as her unless she found a supply of new mass, and soon.

It had been many years since she had a substantial meal. Living on nothing but the sparse energy between the stars, she had grown lean. Once so powerful, she might have been mistaken for a star herself; she was now so enfeebled she did not even emit light, a flicker between the stars.

The last three unstable wormholes she discovered had taken her far from the galactic core and the abundant light sources she was accustomed to. In the beginning she did not panic. She was certain she would be able to find a path back to her part of the core. She had been assigned to study the rare pairing of two black holes circling each other in a collapsing orbit. Both stars spinning at hundreds of revolutions per second and circling each other in minutes, created a gravity song rarely heard by her people, who studied such phenomenon for the secrets to the underlying First Sound.

Suddenly, perhaps it was her own great mass, she had as much mass as a star herself back then, or perhaps some unknown equilibrium had been struck but the two stars event horizons collapsed into each other. They crashed together and the resulting energy blinded her and caused her to lose her equilibrium. The resulting gravity distortions disrupted her perception of the First Sound near her and she was unable to maintain the probability of her position and she was lost.

The energy of the explosion did not hurt her, of course, her species fed on the radiation of millions of stars, less than a few light years apart, as well as the gas scattered throughout the luminous core, a rich feeding area for her people who had lived for billions of years traveling the gravimetric fields, listening to the harmonies of the stars with their interacting fields of light, gravity, and super-string harmonies against the ominous baritone of the super-massive stellar mass that the entire galaxy revolved around.

Her people called the object at the core of the galaxy the First Sound. She missed its comforting vibrations of the gravity web she grew up in. Out here, its baritone was muted by distance, barely a ripple, but its reach is felt even here as all that is part of the First Sound stays close to it, surrounds it and moves through the universe bound to it. At this distance, though she barely knew it existed.

Her senses strained to their limit, she was aware of a tiny white dwarf on a nearby galactic arm, an island in this lonely part of space. She realized if there was no gas giants in this star system, she would starve to death in a few centuries, unable to activate her probability engine and return to her people. To die alone was the worse thing she could think of and that spurred her to take the rash action of jettisoning fifty percent of her remaining mass. She had barely more mass than a small planet now. She focused her attention on the star, and brought it into resolution. Ten times, fifty times, still not enough. One hundred times, one thousand times, she compensated for gravitation lensing caused by dark matter, she compensated for galactic drift, noted the declination in the fabric of space-time caused by the star. She would attempt to drop out of drive near the edge of its gravity well.

Then she waited. Two dozen years passed as she watched the star to see if there were other planets around it. And there was the flicker as a world passed in front of it, again and again, so quickly she was unsure of what she was seeing. The planet is massive, and its close to the star. It was a gas giant but so close to the star. How was she going be able to feed off of it, when it was so fast and she was so slow now. She would have to retain her speed now if she was to have any chance.

Another dozen years pass as her probability drive activated using nearly all of her remaining energy. Folding space-time, she willed herself to cross this vast gulf of space. She could see her family and hear the baritone of the First Sound. The jump took too much energy. She had been unconscious and only the proximity to the sun woke her. She was still moving fast, her jump had successfully conserved her movement.

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The sun took up one third of the sky. Its gravity clawed at her, pulled her, drew her toward it. She looked around and prepared to redirect her course away from the star. Where was the gas giant? She looked around and only then did she realize she had miscalculated and was heading directly toward the world which was supposed to be her refuge. She had planned to come up from behind it, scoop the atmospheric mass that she needed, make the repairs necessary and leave once her drive was recharged.

That plan was gone now. At this angle of descent she would smash into the thick atmosphere of the planet and its violent storms and be destroyed. She had only one chance and not much time. She began to redistribute her mass. She shifted her non-vital mass and prepared to launch it away from herself. She was not used to working this quickly and many of her vital systems were still active. She would suffer memory loss, but she hoped it would be nothing vital. But she did not have the luxury of time.

She was used to having years to do things, now she had hours. She had never had to make decisions this quickly. She looked at the approaching gas giant and could see its gravity well going deep into the fabric of space-time. Its mass must be enormous. She would have one chance. She would use the last of her energy, to propel the inactive matter away from her and thrust toward the planet in order to ride into the gravity well and whip around the planet. If she timed it just right, she could arrange to end up trapped in a permanent Trojan orbit with the planet.

All of her computations said she would be held at the Trojan point indefinitely, but there was a large margin for error since she did not know enough about the planet’s atmospheric density, wind speeds or chemical makeup. She did not have the luxury of time. So much had gone wrong, she was simply without enough choices. There was also the matter of mass to be ejected. The most massive element of her remaining systems after her neural complex was her probability drive. She would need to eject it and work with her attitude systems only, and what she could reconfigure on the way down. which means if she is unsuccessful and cannot gain enough mass, she would never leave here.

Less than an hour remained. She prepared the probability drive for jettison; the mass she ejected would begin a spiral toward the sun. The information to build another was within her, but only if her neural complex could be saved. She streamlined herself and created a form capable of skimming the atmosphere. She would also attempt to grab some mass for analysis and conversion.

The time passed so quickly. She had not been this close to a sun in decades, and the radiant energy soothed her and she made peace with this insane plan. She ejected half of her mass again and material equal to the mass of the Earth fell away toward the white dwarf. The shunted mass redirected her, partially due to the action-reaction and partially because she became much more maneuverable. Her new, streamlined self hurtled toward the planet, and it grew large, obscuring the sun in a matter of minutes. She turned her belly toward the planet and she could sense the density of molecules increasing, gently at first and then more heavily. She rode the top of the cloud layer briefly while she picked up speed.

She opened her ram jets and ingested the matter. She saw she could burn it and her plan depended on this. She scooped it, compressed it and attempted to start the engines. No success. Fuel ratios, out of balance, must correct. She was beginning to catch too much atmosphere, she would begin to slow down. If she did not get these jets started she would begin to lose too much speed to escape.

Fuel mixture needed higher pressure, higher ignition rate, she needed to go deeper into the atmosphere. She inched her way into the atmosphere, her wide wings spread out, increasing the pressure bit by bit. Once she had the right pressure, the engines ignited and she had a sudden burst of speed, Then the engines performed better. The faster she went the faster they gathered mass. Her plan was working.

Then she noticed a storm below her and the ionization on her hull. As she moved through the atmosphere, she was building up ions on the hull making her attractive to the storm below. The storm was thousands of miles wide and would take her minutes to pass over. The first lightning strikes were the worst, as her cold hull was covered in ionized matter and gas.  There was damage all over her body, systems overloading everywhere. She made what repairs she could internally and hoped she would be outside of the range of the storm shortly. As the hull heated due to friction and energy discharges, it lost its attractiveness and within a few hours the energy discharges stopped.

She extended her senses into the atmosphere of the planet and noticed there were differing layers, each with its own weather activity. And there was simple life here just below her layer in the clouds. A cloud creature of some sort, floating in groups like she and her family once did. She reconfigured her primary boosters to utilize a refined fuel she had been working with while studying the clouds. She was more than halfway around the planet and now needed to begin adding to her thrust profile. The ramjets would not be enough. She prepared her new fuel and pressurized the systems.

Each engine was the size of a mountain and she had hundreds of them. She activated them in a series of controlled operations, because to fire them all at once in atmosphere would tear her apart. The controlled burns began, each exploded with the force of a million nuclear weapons, in a sequence, faster and faster. Unexpectedly, the engines began to ignite the atmosphere, its natural chemical makeup allowed the powerful engines to ignite it and the flames surged out in a fire trail for thousands of miles, and once the storm started, it spread. She saw the flames surging toward the giant creatures and eventually overtake them.

They burned quickly, the gas that kept them buoyant was highly flammable. They did not suffer long. The last of her engines ignited and she was certain she would make it once the last step was made. She prepared the final jettison and fired the last of the main engines as she left the atmosphere. The ramjets and wings, hundreds of megatons fell away to burn up in the atmosphere, now she was just a needle, her core systems, her engines, her data network, her manufactorum, her ability to create a new her, was all that was left as she streaked away from the planet. As she entered the light of the sun, she flickered like a diamond and slowly came to rest in the Trojan  orbit of the planet.

There was so little of her left. She could still see her fiery trail burning in the clouds, as the planet orbited beneath her. Now in geosynchronous orbit, she created a tendril of matter to drop into the atmosphere of the world. She also spread herself thin to gather the energy of the solar wind. With the tendril below, she would slowly siphon off mass from the planet. With the energy of the sun she would spread out until energy was flowing freely. This would allow her to rebuild herself over a few centuries.

Nearly a thousand years passed. She has grown from a tiny sliver of light to a massive moon of the great world below. And she has a satellite, a daughter moon of her own to ease her loneliness. She has told her daughter of the voice of the First Sound and how she can barely hear it from this location. She has told her of the probability drive and how it was almost complete. She would be able to take them back to the core and to their family. Unfortunately, the storms destroyed much of her memory of their migration routes so they would have to hunt for them. It might take some time, a few centuries at least.

Her daughter asks her about their sun, and their animals in the atmosphere of their Jovian world. She loved taking care of them and using her smaller bodies to joyride through the solar system.

Mother explains they will be fine and now that we have been here and lived here for so long, we will be able come back and see them any time she wants. This location would be keyed to their drives.

Her daughter tells her how happy that makes her and says she could not imagine living anywhere else.

Mother agrees with her daughter but will also be glad to be going home. This place saved her life and she was grateful, but it would never be home, even if she lived here for a thousand years. And she did. And it still wasn’t.

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Hunger © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Nervous Stomach

Posted by Ebonstorm on October 23, 2014
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, science fiction, Short Story, Twilight Continuum. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

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A Tale of the Twilight Continuum

“Is there a problem, Ensign,” the captain’s voice rang out over the bustle of the command bridge. I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head. I knew it had to be me he was talking to, I was nervous, fidgeting, fighting back the urge to run in sheer terror.

“No sir. I have never used a Precursor Warp Gate before. I understand the physics, I think. But its another thing to be heading at one.”

“Gravitational compensation online,” came from somewhere behind the captain. “We have activated artificial gravity shielding and structural integrity. We are ready for descent in P-Space.”

“Does the idea of heading a top speed toward a neutron star disturb you? If it makes you feel any better, Ensign. I have done this at least a hundred times. It doesn’t get any easier.” The captain tapped the comm button on his ear. “All hands, prepare for P-Space Incursion. Make ready all gear, shut down all non-essential equipment. Report to your P-Space readiness positions. Incursion countdown commencing.”

A timer activated on the wall and the bridge lighting dimmed. My stomach flipped. I looked down at my console and the readings were so contradictory, my knowledge of science flew out of the metaphysical window. What these readings reported was simply impossible.

“You’re new onboard the Reprisal, so you get the speech while we plunge toward certain doom. First Officer, would you mind?”

“Not at all. Science is my specialty. Ensign, you are looking at a neutron star. You would expect it to be revolving at hundreds if not thousands of times per second, would you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

First Officer Herrick walked to my station and activated the central holo display. He pressed a few more tabs and accompanying information followed. Gravitational stress information, directional path to intercept, additional bodies surrounding the neutron star and a curious formation of structures just outside of our intercept path. This was the Precursor Gate Technology.

“The Precursor Gates steal the angular momentum from what were once spinning neutron stars to power their technology. In conventional terms, if you could capture angular momentum, it would be one of the greatest sources of energy available from a material object. The neutron star is still spinning, but it spins very slowly, about one revolution per hour; a billionth of its normal rotation rate. The rest of this energy is bound up by the gate system and held for the creation of a wormhole between two gates.”

As he spoke, I could see an anomaly appear on the surface of the neutron star coming into view. We would intercept this in less than four minutes at our present speed.

“We are, in effect threading a very large needle into a very tiny hole through time and space, created by the Precursor Gates and powered by the energy of two dead stars. This gate is one of the most stable in this sector and has been used by the Corvan Hegemony for over ten thousand years.”

“Most stable, sir? You mean there are gates that are less stable or broken?”

Herrick smiled as he looked at me. The smile of a predator enjoying the squirmings of its helpless prey. “Some of the oldest Precursor gates and we are not really sure of how old they are, even the Corvans don’t know for sure, have mass restrictions. We don’t know if the gates are malfunctioning or whether the momentum capture systems are breaking down. What we do know is those stars spin faster and are far less tolerant of massive ships. Only fighters, escorts and frigates can use those gates because they can penetrate the event horizon before the gate rotates beneath them. If we tried to use one of those, our ship would be cut in half.”

My stomach clenched, my mouth had that watery feeling you get right before you vomit. We were moving at .9c at a gravitational body under any other circumstances we would do everything possible to avoid. “Sir, one more question, if I may?”

“Incursion in one minute.”

“Make it quick, Ensign. I want you to be settled in for your first time.”

“What are all of those objects, planetoids and the like doing around this neutron star? If this were a natural phenomenon, none of them would be there, right?”

Herrick sat down and strapped himself into his chair. He activated his structural integrity field and nodded to the captain.

Captain Lance nodded back and tapped his ear comm again. “Prepare for incursion, sixty seconds. See you on the other side.” He turned back toward the ensign. “You’re right, if this were a natural phenomenon, there wouldn’t be any planets here. The Corvans think they are part of the technology stabilizing the gravity corridor we use when we approach the wormhole. As they decay, torn apart by the forces we can barely understand, they indicate the overall stability of the wormhole. This one has four worlds around it. One of them is crumbling and will slowly fall into the neutron star. As it crumbles the wormhole will grow smaller. When the last world is gone, the wormhole collapses and that gate portal is inaccessible. There are gates which have as many as twenty planets around them.”

“What would you need a gate with that many stabilizing bodies for?” It was clear there were some things they didn’t cover in school.

“To move planets, Ensign. The Precursors used these things to move planets.” I remembered to close my mouth.

“Will it hurt, Captain?” I watched the countdown timer reach ten seconds.

“Like a son-of-a-bitch, Ensign. If I were you, I’d bite down. It’ll feel like forever.”

Damned if he wasn’t right.

Nervous Stomach © Thaddeus Howze 2014, All Rights Reserved5 minute fiction

Brotherhood

Posted by Ebonstorm on September 21, 2013
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, science fiction, Short Story, Twilight Continuum. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Holocaust Earth

a tale of hayward’s reach

“I went yesterday.”

“I went out the day before.”

“I don’t care who went out, when. Put your guns on and get out there and bring back something to eat. I don’t care what it is.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“See what you did, now she’s mad at us.”

“I didn’t make her mad, you did.”

“Anyway, food won’t hop into the house by itself. You two get a move on. Get back before dark.”

“Yes, Auntie.” Ma’s sister was almost as mean as she was.

We left the habitat by the back door, and after looking both ways we started down the vine and headed out of the park, into the city. It used to be called Philadelphia; back when stuff like that mattered.

“Did you pack everything?”

“Why do you always ask me if I packed everything, its not like you weren’t standing right there, supervising.”

“Last time we were out, you forgot the wipes.”

“So, you were forced to use your hand or some leaves, why should I care, how you handle your business?”

“You suck.”

“You ought to know.”

“Be quiet. I hear something.”

Whenever we go out, we are always very careful. There used to be lots of humies once upon a time, but after They came, there were a lot less. We can see the one closest to the main city. It sits outside of the city proper and sends its parts looking for food.

Humies learned not to live in the cities if they wanted to avoid being food. Mama said once, cities used to be filled with humies but now, nobody with any sense goes there. That’s why there is so much stuff still there. We don’t tell Ma, but sometimes we go there and look for stuff. We learned how to avoid the plants and their critters.

“There it is. It’s a cabbage-head.”

“I don’t like cabbage-heads. We just ate one a few weeks ago. I’d rather eat my boot first ‘fore I eat another.”

“We ate our boots last week, so we probably shouldn’t get a cabbage-head anyway, they be the makings of poor boots.”

We let the cabbage-head wander off. They weren’t too dangerous or too bright and noisy as all get out, so you didn’t have to worry ’bout them sneakin’ up or anything. They looked like a horse with the head of a cabbage. And they were about as bright.

Then we saw them. And we nodded. That was the target. Razorbacks. That’s what mama called them when she taught us to hunt. Razorbacks were part of the Creature, a fast and dangerous part. They hated humies, too.

We waited cause there were too many to try and get one. They had six long legs and were really fast even though they were twice as big as a humie.

“Why don’t you watch ’em, while I catch some shut eye.”

“kay, its gonna be a while.” I liked it better when he slept anyway, its the only relief I get from his godforsaken mouth. We had taken a position near the edge of the city where a lot of the Creature’s parts wandered looking for scavenging humies. There was a mild quakin’ and I could see the Creature moving closer to the city. It must be real upset or real hungry, it moved a whole dozen feet today.

There were still humies living in the city, we knew that cause we could see their lights at night, but the Creature did not have many ‘spring that moved around after dark. There were a few, but not many. Humies tried to do their scavenging after dark, cause it was a bit safer than when there were hawkwings about.

After a couple of hours, the Creature settled down, mostly cause the sky was ‘cast and it did not have any shine on it. The razorbacks started moving back toward the Creature. It was taller than all of the buildings near us. Mama said it was nearly five thousand feet tall and when they landed they changed the weather, killing humie by the dozens every second for years. She said something about spores, but I was never good with that science type stuff. My brother was much better.

One of the razorbacks turns and holds still. It starts makin’ its supper sound and turning around. We duck behind the heavy rock wall and wait. It turns toward a building near the clearing next to it. A humie runs out and tries to scurry to the next building. The razorback supper sound grows louder as it turns to the humie, locks its legs and charges fast, faster than any humie could hope to be.

The humie turns around and points a tiny gun at the razorback. Its pop does not even make the razorback blink. The razorback runs past the humie and its skin bursts with blood. It staggers and tries to keep running. The razorback circles and passes again. The touch of its skin rips the flesh off the humie, and after the second pass the humie falls down.

A second humie runs out, he is a bit bigger and is carrying a shotgun. But shoots too soon and the razorback does him in quick.

“Get up. We got one on the hook.”

“I was just startin’ to have my favor dream and you ruined it.”

“You wants some boots or not. You can walk barefoot for all I care, but I wants some boots. There ain’t no better hide than razorback and ain’t no better eatin’ either. So shut up and get up.”

We check our guns and make sure our chems was dry. No sense shooting if nothing happens. I don’t want to tangle with a razorback with just my knife if I can avoid it. My brother is good in a fight but it just the two of us these days, so we can’t afford to get hurt.

The razorback is so busy eatin’ it doesn’t even hear us getting close. We hid in the shadows of the building. It don’t see too good and we know that having hunted them for years. It was slow going. Ma says no sense rushing if you get et by what you be chasing. By the time we are close enough to shoot, it was getting dark. We would have to gut, skin and carve before the biguns came out. And then run for home.

As we approached, my brother covered the right and I covered the left, making sure there were no razorbacks hiding that we might have missed. They were group kin, so where there was one, there may be more. The long shadow of the Creature fell over us and we used the cover of its darkness and the setting shine, to sneak up just a few dozen feet from the creature. We aimed, making sure we hit it below the sack in its belly. That was the only part we could eat and we wanted to be sure we didn’t just come home with boots. Mama would tan our hide.

We each had three in our shooters. They were hand-made from parts in the city. Three barrels, three chems. I shot first, making sure to hit it in the head. My brother shot second, hitting it in its hind brain. If you didn’t get both, it could still trample you with its head shot clean off. We ducked back into the darkness to wait. We couldn’t wait long with dark coming but it was always best after bustin’ a chem or two. After ten minutes, we went to work.

“Hurry up, you got that sack yet?”

“Don’t worry about me, you just get the hide for our boots.”

“I am. I am going to get enough for mama to get a coat too. This razorback’s skin is good.”

The skin was covered with a fine grade of spines, but they only cut you if you rubbed the wrong way or if the razorback was alive and pushing them up. Even though it was really big, it was delicate and slashed it food, bleeding it before eatin’. The spines and its leathery hide gave it a toughness that made for fine boots.

We loaded the sack and the hide into our ruck, and started making our way home. We had to pass by the river on our way back to wash off the blood before going home. No need to make it too easy to find us. The river was not too far off and we made good time.

We waded in quick-like and cleaned ourselves up. We could hear the wind shifting near the Creature and once the shine was completely gone, we knew the Bigguns was on the prowl. Picking up our guns at the shore, we started running back toward our tree.

We were in too much of a hurry, when we heard a booming sound from the underbrush ahead of us. We had our guns ready, when two of the bigguns burst out, mouths wide open, spit flying everywhere. Each of us took one, I took the right, he took the left. We shot them straight in their mouths. Its the only spot on their bodies not covered in heavy armor. Each chem went straight into their brains and blew up from the inside.

We jumped over their bodies and kept running. Others would hear the chem and rush toward food. We moved through the outskirts of what mama called a suburb. She learned all of this from reading. She said she taught herself when she was young and there were other humies to live with. It had been a long time since other humies lived with us, nearly thirty summers, give or take.

We could hear them coming.

Sounded like three, maybe four. All of the Creature’s parts were fast and hungry. If mama were here, we would just turn around and fight, mama was hell on wheels in a fight, but since she hurt her leg a few summers ago when we were surrounded by razorback and hawkwings, she don’t hunt with us anymore.

“What ya wanna do?”

“I hear, three, maybe four.”

“We only got, a two chem between us.”

“we could drop the food and get away, its slowing us down.”

“If we come home without food, mama’s going to eat us. I would rather be out here with them.”

“Just keep running.”

When we came to the park, we could see all of the Creature trees that had landed here. Mama said humies learned to kill the trees brains when they was little and we could live in them while they grew. The trees never got their own creatures when they did not have brains and humies learned to live in them and make homes out of them. We could see our tree in the center of the park but it was just too far, we wasn’t gonna make it.

“We gonna have to fight, you know that, right.”

“I reckon.”

“You ready?”

“Don’t miss.”

“Have I ever?”

“Nope.”

They jumped out of the brush and the earth shook with their landing. We dropped our ruck and had our guns out. One chem each. Four Bigguns. They looked so much bigger up close. When we stopped, they stopped. They had got have seen the two others we killed, and no one was volunteering to go first. We used that to get a few dozen more yards, by pointing at whichever moved toward us first. That wasn’t gonna work too much longer.

“Biggest one first, on the right.

“Then the one next to it.”

“Got your knife?”

“Yep. Aim for the eyes.”

We stopped moving, each of the bigguns with an armored head and a spike collar stood still. They seemed to know we were going to fight. We roared at them at the top of our lungs, and bared our teeth. The largest two responded in kind. And then they were dead. We dropped out guns.

Pulling our knives, we rushed the next of the creatures while they absorbed the shock of what happened. While they had good vision facing forward they had to turn their whole bodies to see if something moved to the side of them too quickly. With six legs they could do that fast, but only if another one wasn’t in the way. While they were trying to negotiate, we slipped to the side of the Biggun and stabbed into its eye sockets with our knives. We were covered in its warm eye jelly and blood and it reared backward knocking us aside with its huge head.

We landed on the ground, hard and our knives were still in the head of the Biggun that was running off into the overgrowth of the suburbs.

The last Biggun, turned toward us and seemed to sense our vulnerability. It stamped the ground and huffed. The tree was right behind us but it might as well have been miles away. With those six legs, he would be on us faster than ugly on my brother.

We stood up, determined to go down fightin’, though without weapons, we did not have much of a chance.

I looked up at the Creature in the distance. It glowed with a green light once the ‘shine was gone. It made it easier for its kin to find it. I could see three others in the distance, each standing still over a different part of the city. My brother and I had managed to live in the shadow of the things for thirty years before dying.

“You ready?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Who said anything about dying?”

“Between the two of us, all we got left is some harsh language.”

We started laughing as the creature closed with us. We would do our best.

We heard a swooshing sound, like nothing we had ever heard before. We thought it might be a creature we had not seen yet, so we crouched low, so we could try to get up on the Biggun’s back, over its snapping jaws.

And then there was the loudest boom I ever heard. Sharp shards of metal ripped though our skin and we were thrown from our feet. Chunks of Biggun landed on us. There was a crater where the Biggun was. It looked just like the ‘rite craters from when the creatures landed all them years ago, only a sight smaller.

My ears were ringing and I was a bit dizzy for a second. I saw my brother was okay with little more than a cut on his forehead and some minor wounds on his chest.

“What were the two of you laughing about down there. Did you see something funny I didn’t?”

“No, ma.”

“Where are you manners at boys?” The voice was Auntie’s.

“Thank you, ma.”

“Now get up here and bring me whatever you managed to find out there. You did find something. If not, you bring up that blowed up Biggun meat. Its foul, but you can eat it in a pinch.”

“We found something, ma.”

“Razorback, your favorite.”

“Did you bring me any hide? You know I need a new coat this winter.”

“Yes, Ma, we got you and Auntie fixin’s for a new coat.”

When the smoke cleared we could see Ma looking down on us with some strange contraption on her shoulder. It was a tube with a handle on the bottom and had a orange tip facing down toward us. Her sister was looking out toward the horizon while she stared down at us as we climbed the rope toward the house. The tiny scratches we suffered wouldn’t keep us from getting home.

When we got to the house, Ma kissed us while her sister watched the horizon. Then we all turned into the house and slid the ironwood door closed. My brother’s arm had a nasty cut and Ma tended it while her sister looked me over and cleaned my arm and chest wounds.

Both of them fixed our injuries with their medical kit placed between us, with the same speed and the same way at which we butchered that razorback, they were able to tend our wounds, one handed.

It had become second nature because we were injured almost ever time we left the house. We sat facing each other with our arms at our sides. Our huge broad chest was covered with scars from earlier surgeries after being in the field. A quick inventory and they were satisfied we were okay. Our four heads and two bodies silhouetted in the internal green light of the Creature tree.

“You boys look a right mess, don’t they sis.”

“They sure do. A right mess. Nothing a meal and a good night sleep won’t fix. Go lay down while we make supper.”

They kissed each of us and we walked into the back of the house, which was carved out of the flesh of the Creature-tree and saw our bed carved into the wall of the tree. They had already turned it out and fluffed our pillows.

“Face down or face up?”

“Face up. These cuts on my chest hurt.”

“Ow.”

“Crybaby.”

As we lay down and covered up with the blanket, he was out in seconds. We almost didn’t make it today. But there is no place I would rather be than right here with my brother, big head and all. I could hear mom and sis walking in the kitchen doing their dinner-making dance, one hand stirring and the other keeping the pot steady, singing some old duet.

I pulled his arm under the blanket and lay back on my own pillow making sure I faced right. He always starts out turned left but ends up turned right in the night.

He sleeps with his mouth open. I hate that.

Brotherhood  © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Rhapsody

Posted by Ebonstorm on June 23, 2013
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, Insurrection, Twilight Continuum. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

5

a tale of the Twilight Continuum

Humans think they love music.

They will tell you about which musicians transformed the world with music, or how a particular music emphasizes one spiritual aspect or another. If Human religion was to be any baseline, no religion had ever transformed us like music did our hosts, the Corvans.

For them, music is speech, sweeping song, organic light, thumping vibration, a complex philosophy and an all-encompassing epistemology. Born with a four lobed brain, they were able to mix sound, color and bio-luminescence in a way we were only able to do with the most sophisticated of computers.

Born underwater, looking vaguely like the best-possible merger of squid and octopus, they have multiple cavities and bladders to move air around. This made each Corvan a living symphony. Any single entity is capable of a range of thousands of sounds, with the capacity of organizing and sounding eight to ten notes simultaneously.

As refugees to the Toranor system, Humans offered our cultural libraries or what was left of them and our music, which was uniquely ours, as part of our payment for our rescue from our failed Earth.

The Corvans musical masters learned most of the human lexicon of music in a year and considered our most accomplished musicians little more than children in the arts of music.

Until we started making instruments. Corvans had no musical instruments in their native environments.

As Humanity settled on the Botani homeworld in the Toranor system, we began to hanker for the things of our lost Earth and eventually began to make musical instruments. Having nothing but memories, pictures, and the occasional scribbled schematic, we were forced to reinvent our world, one instrument, one piano key, one cello string at a time.

Since few instruments had survived our rapid exit of Earth, we were forced to ask our hosts how we could make something from native materials. The Botani, a tree-like organic computer spanning their planet’s equator allowed their symbiotic partners to help us find what we needed to make new instruments.

The amphibious Corvan musicians would visit frequently coming out of the river whenever we tested our instruments. They were unfailingly polite as we tuned, tested and began reinventing ourselves under these alien suns, with new neighbors, on a world not our own.

The Botani would make us welcome at night and after a few days of listening to us play, altered their leaves and shaped the wind making soft musical notes, subtle at first, but as the winds increased, the tempo changed, the cracking of their bark became percussion which wove itself into the wind-swept whistles, the rustle of leaves, shakers, and their symbiotic partners drummed on various cavities making percussive sounds which echoed and moved randomly around us, slowly woven into a shuddering rhythm.

They learned to do this watching us practice. Untaught.

Eventually, the Corvans came upon us as we played with the Botani and their symbiotes and with nary a pause joined us in awe of the sounds of instruments playing together. Our tiny band of thirty instruments seemed small to us but their fascination and participation heartened the rusty Human musicians and spurred them to continue. The Corvans surrounded the pianist, an older man who was fond of improvisational jazz and played sweetly in sync.

Three aliens species with nothing in common, found each other through music. One group, born to it, another barely able to make music without tools and a third who incredible computation abilities never understood the joy of making music until they did it with us.

The pianist, now surrounded by the Corvans who had all but marveled at the instrument requested a desire to learn. Within hours he had taught them to play. Their perfect-pitched squeals of delight filled the glade.

They spent the next month wondering how many keys their pianos designs should have since they had six arms…

Rhapsody © Thaddeus Howze 2013, All Rights Reserved

ScreenHunter_453 Jul. 01 18.14

Suicide Seed

Posted by Ebonstorm on May 25, 2013
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

ScreenHunter_404 May. 24 17.29

a tale of Hayward’s Reach

Stephanie Mehta woke Thursday morning to her clock radio in her tiny apartment in the Russian city of Moscow. It was little more than a room with a kitchen and bathroom.   She shuffled around slowly until she got her bearings. She was a diminutive Indian woman in her early thirties, with clear skin, long hair, and full lips. Her mother always wondered what was holding up her grandchildren when she had a daughter as beautiful as she was. Just another thing they had to fight about.

Her Russian Blue, Fedya, hopped up onto the counter and nuzzled her, releasing a tiny squeak, indicating his hope for breakfast, sooner rather than later. She nuzzled him back, and stroked him absently while she tried to remember what there was to eat in her apartment. She knew not to look in the half-height refrigerator, because she had not had anything fresh enough to require refrigeration in quite some time.

The tiny markets on the outskirts of Moscow had been bringing in less food in the last few years. Farmers were complaining about reduced harvests, and no one seemed to have any idea why the crops were getting smaller and smaller. Stephanie had taken to growing potatoes in the corner of her apartment from the eyes of earlier generations she had scavenged, and had been successful in managing their growth. Her apartment did not have much, but sunlight was in abundance.

“Sorry, little one, it looks like potatoes again.” His tiny reply seemed resigned to potatoes, and he ate them with vigor. “I promise to bring you something that looks like meat from the hospital tonight.”

Stephanie washed up quickly, trying not to use up her allotment of water for the day. Water shortages had become all too frequent since she came here eight years ago to start her residency. She opted to come to Russia because so many of her people started moving north as the rising sea levels drove many Indians into Rangapur. Her mother suggested she move to Russia because of the growing economic prosperity there.

She had since informed her mother that economic prosperity was relative. Yes, Russia was doing better in some ways, and worse in others. For example, India had more doctors, but Russia had more hospitals. If she didn’t hurry she would be late for her shift. Fortunately she lived in a barracks arrangement right next to the Municipal Hospital No. 15, and it only took her fifteen minutes to walk across the overpass into the main hospital courtyard.

The hospital was busy, people everywhere, babies crying, staff bustling about trying their best to tend to patients. As she danced through the crowds, patients touched her white coat and asked her questions. She tried not to stand still lest she be overrun. They needed to go through the brief paperwork at the desk before they could be seen. She would see as many today as her supervisor would let her.

She was technically a full doctor, but her supervisor had been reluctant to sign off on her paperwork because it kept her with him here at Fifteen. She would have been upset if she hadn’t loved her job so much, even with the lack of resources, the constant rush of patients, the government interference, or any of a number of other issues. She wasn’t just a doctor, she was a healer; she wanted to find out how to help as many people as possible.

Ekantika Das was her last patient of the day, and she agreed to take her from her supervisor, Helmut Baum, who had been on for three days straight. Mrs. Das looked tired, strained. She was probably borderline malnourished and dehydrated, like most people were these days. The rains had been less frequent, and the summer was one of the hottest on record.

“What brings you in, Mrs. Das?”

She began tentatively. “Doctor Baum scheduled me to come and see him a few weeks after my miscarriage.” Stephanie had looked briefly at the record and saw that she had three miscarriages in less than two years. Each happened earlier and earlier during her term.

“I would like to run a series of tests to see how you are doing, and when I am done, we will see what we can do. Do you still want to have children?” Many women, if they find they cannot carry to term, these days opt just to give up.

“Yes, desperately. My husband and I work as part of a collective on the outskirts of town, trying to turn older buildings into hydroponic structures to supplement food output for the greater Moscow area. We are recently wed, and would like to have children since neither of us is getting any younger.”

“I understand. These tests will take less than a week, so I will send you an email to schedule your visit.”

“Namaste, Doctor.”

The rest of the week was uneventful, and there was even a slowdown at the hospital. Patients were always reluctant to come to hospitals these days since the number of cases of MRSA had risen in the last twenty years. Over-use of antibiotics had caused the rise in the resistant disease strains. People needed hospitals more than ever, but were reluctant to come there with the risk of catching a nearly incurable disease while being served.

Later that week, when she got the test results, they were unusual, but she could not put her finger on why. She went back and checked Dr. Baum’s records. He had made some notes about fertility issues in several of his patients, so she kept working. Something about it seemed strange to Stephanie. In a momentary lull, she went down to the primitive records databases and made some soft queries using the records of the female population of child bearing ages at the hospital. After a few dozen questions, she made a startling discovery. The number of births at the hospital and in the area in general had dramatically dropped, far below the statistical average. She thought she had done something wrong and double-checked her queries.

These numbers could not be right. This would be a thirty percent reduction in live births in less than a ten year period. Stephanie was tired. She assumed she had made a mistake and planned to run the check from home once she was settled.

* * *

Fedya was enjoying his purloined sirloin and wrestled mightily with it. It was mostly scrap from the senior doctor’s kitchen, but that mattered little to him. His gusto gave Stephanie a warm glow while she studied the data now from the fourteen nearby hospitals.

She couldn’t understand why no one had noticed it before now, but the more she looked at it, the more she could see the scale of this issue. But she would need more information and likely some corroboration with some colleagues, possibly in London. With the new civil war in the U.S., she wasn’t likely to get much data except from the neutral states like California or Oregon. So she prepared a data package for a variety of hospitals and sent it off.  Immediately, she received an instant message.

–IM–

GreenMachine: You are in danger.

Dr. Mehta: Excuse me?

GreenMachine: There is not much time. Can you meet me in an hour at this net address?

Dr. Mehta: Who are you?

Greenmachine: This address is secure, but you cannot be at your apartment. I have slowed the trace, but they will find you in twenty-four hours. Pack a bag. Now hurry.

Dr. Mehta: I can’t leave my cat.

Greenmachine: Then take him with you, but for God’s sake, hurry. Now get to the coffee shop, and we will give you further instructions.

Dr. Mehta: I have no intention of leaving home on the say-so of some unknown IM.

Greenmachine: You have discovered a reduction in birthrates in the area hospitals where you work. You have checked this against local hospitals in the Russian datasphere. You find the information able to be confirmed with an 87% accuracy. Tomorrow you will receive data clusters from your points in London, New Delhi, Mexico, Canada, Brazil. You will see that this trend or worse had happened across the globe. How am I doing?

Dr. Mehta: How do you know I did all this?

Greenmachine: GO TO THE COFFEE SHOP. NOW.

The IM client connection vanished, and she sat up in disbelief. Putting her data key into her pocket, she grabbed her night bag and packed two changes of clothing, her level 1 Medical ID, and all the money she kept in the house. She barely spent any, so she should have plenty available.

She dropped Fedya off at a friendly neighbor’s with a generous bribe of her latest potato crop and some cash in the event she was gone longer than a few days. Fedya complained the entire time until she gave him his favorite squeaky toy. Dame Romanov agreed to take care of him. She had always liked him and said he would have plenty of mice to keep his belly full.

When she got to the coffee shop, the terminals were empty because it was near midnight. When the late shift came on, the place would fill up, but that would not be for another hour or so. She sat down and put on the wireless ear buds sitting in the sonic cleanser.

As soon as she plugged in her data-key, a video image appeared. The man sitting in the video was in a laboratory with a single tech working in the background. He was wearing a full bio-suit, so his face was obscured, but she could see this was a real lab with real equipment, not a stage. “Doctor, you have discovered something Consanko does not want known. Birthrates all over the world are declining due to the interactions of a genetic manipulation called ‘suicide seeds.’

“This technology was designed thirty years ago as a means of controlling food production on Earth. Seeds were being designed to fail to produce a new generation of seeds so Consanko would become the sole provider of seeds as it cornered the market on genetic seed materials all over the planet.

“Once they had patented nearly all of the food crops on the planet, they gathered the genetic materials, mapped the genomes, and proceeded to alter the seed products to ensure no seed would be produced by the resultant plants. People would have to pay every season. Needless to say, Consanko grew fabulously rich.

“As scientists had predicted, monocultures would be a problem when blight, insects or disease struck, but Consanko had variants it saved for that occasion, and their wealth continued to grow until this very day. But I noticed there was a corresponding effect in animal populations that ate seeds created from these plants. They became increasingly sterile. You have now learned the other secret: that it is affecting us as well. More slowly, but just as effectively.”

The lab tech in the background seemed to be working hurriedly. The man in the front of the display held up a picture. “See this face? Memorize it. He is the person you are trying to find. When you look through our upload, you will find he knew about everything. Maybe he can help you find the answers you are looking for.”

An explosion rocked the room. Smoke started coming from the ventilation shafts. “We don’t have much time. That explosion was a trap set up in the ventilation. They won’t try that route again. Our suits will protect us from the gas, but in a few minutes, they will up the ante and we won’t survive. Our upload is on its way to you via our intelligent agent. We are destroying any trace of our information to give you as much lead time as possible. Doctor, we are sorry to involve you in this fashion, but we had lost hope that anyone would notice. We were going to leave our data to an intelligent agent and hope the first person who found it was as good as you are.”

“What do you want me to do?” The sight of an arc cutter coming through the armored door showed their attacker’s progress in the attempt to gain access.

“We want you to stop this. There must be a way to reverse it, some way to introduce our reproductive viability back into the species before it’s lost completely. Our predictions say in thirty years, humanity and most animals will have lost any possibility of reproduction.”

“I am not a geneticist. I wouldn’t even know where to begin!” Mehta was feeling frantic as she watched the smoke grow thicker.

“We know you are not a geneticist, but you have other friends. It will take a team to solve this problem, the same way it took a corporation to cause it. We are out of time, Doctor. Godspeed.”

End of transmission. End of recording. Agent instructed to your key codes. All resources are at your discretion.

This was a recording? “Agent, accept vocal input.”

 “Accepting.”

“How long ago did this recording take place?”

“Two standard days ago.”

“Then how were they answering my questions?”

“They weren’t; they anticipated a variety of responses; I provided the interface adaptations. Doctors Lawrence and Cloverfield have been dead for forty-eight hours.”

“How much time do I have before they come looking for me?”

“All temporal estimates are still accurate, as your information requests have been slowed but not stopped. In 24 hours, you will be apprehended, likely by Interpol or the Soviet police as an enemy terrorist. Recommendation: leave the country.”

“And go where, pray tell?”

“To the coordinates left by the doctors.”

“And where is that?”

“The coordinates on the map indicate a location inside the remaining Amazon jungle. It will require one, possibly two major airline flights, one charter flight, and likely six to ten hours of ground travel. You should begin now.”

“I need to go back to my apartment. I am not ready for this.”

“That path is not recommended.”

“Let’s see you stop me. Agent offline.”

Stephanie did not know what she was seeing, but she was certain this was some elaborate practical joke. The shaky camera, the explosion, the shutoff of the camera seemed just too dramatic. When she got back to her building, several emergency vehicles were sitting outside. The lights were off, so whatever it was, it was already over. They were taking several bodies out on stretchers, and one of them had a grey cat lying on top of it. It looked like…

“Fedya!” The grey cat jumped down and ran through the street to Stephanie, and she suddenly realized who one of those bodies was. Showing her badge to the paramedic, she asked, “Show me the bodies.”

When they pulled the covers back, the first was the delicate body of Dame Romanov. The second was Helmut Baum, her boss, her sometime lover, her friend. He had been shot in the head. Seeing him that way was like a physical blow to her system. She grew lightheaded and fell back into the arms of a strange man who had come up behind her.

“Do you know this man, Doctor?”  The man’s Russian was impeccable, and he looked like he could be a policeman or an inspector. His hands were strong, like a vise, and he literally held her up from falling. He was a giant wearing an ill fitting suit, as if they could barely find anything to cover him properly. He had a strong face, young looking, but his eyes were hard, sharp; they glittered like flint in the streetlights, the eyes of a man who had seen too much.

“His name is Doctor Helmut Baum.” He was in apartment 17. Her apartment. Waiting for her. She said none of these things.

“I am Inspector Piotr Nikolayevich Rasputin, and I have a few questions for you. The first is where have you been for the last few hours?”

“I was at the coffee shop for the last two hours. Helmut was at the apartment waiting for me to get in. He had just come in from his shift. Can I sit down, Inspector?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“They appear to have been assassinated. Do you know of any reason they might have been targeted?” Piotr had his own reasons, but he wanted hear hers first.

“No, I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt him. He was a good doctor. He did not have any enemies.” But Stephanie knew it wasn’t true. She had logged in with his address a few days ago, because he was logged in and had a superior clearance. The first traces would have been on his account.

“I’m going to have to take you into the field office for questioning, Dr. Mehta. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“Can I go to my apartment and put my cat there? Will the police allow him to stay at the scene? If not, can I put him with another neighbor?” These questions came boiling out all once.

“Yes, of course, you can leave him with another neighbor. I’ll wait right here until you get back.” Piotr shook out a cigarette and lit up as she moved toward the apartment building. The police had already canvassed the property; whoever they were, they were very good. They left no clues, no casings, no signs of forced entry. An inside job, perhaps.

The emergency vehicles pulled off after twenty minutes, and she had not returned. He put out his third cigarette and went into the building. She was not at her apartment, but one neighbor did have Fedya. But he said she had left nearly twenty minutes ago. So she knew where to drop the cat, and used the remaining time to get a head start.

Touching his datapad earpiece, he spoke into his mastoid comm, “Agent, put a trace on her medical ID at all the local airports and any recent taxi pickups. Do not alert her to the flags. Just follow and report.”

“Request activated, flags sent out. Will notify.”

Piotr got into his car and headed to the Moscow airport. Sometimes technology is no match for a good hunch. When he got to the airport, his agent had already found her booking a flight to South America, quite a distance for a woman with nothing to hide and very little luggage to pack. He decided he needed to see what was really going on.

“Agent, book corresponding flights, inform Command of itinerary. Log it as active investigation. Inform pilot of intent to carry firearm onboard. Clear security checks.”

“Acknowledged. Activity in progress.”

 

This was just to ensure her safety and his curiosity. He had not been out of the country for a while; he was sure South America would be lovely this time of year.  She sat in coach the whole time reading. He was not sure what it was, and did not want to risk having his agent read over her shoulder, so he took this time to catch up on his rest. The only thing he could think of was smoking a cigarette the whole flight until he fell asleep. Where could she go?

* * *

“Or what will happen? You will make me eat some bland chips and tasteless fish from your country? Perhaps some of your beer that tastes like piss? My cat makes a stronger brand of beer in his litter box.”

When the plane landed, he knew he would have to confront her. The next leg of the journey was on a small private plane with only twelve seats. It would be hard to remain inconspicuous. The heat was terrible, and the humidity worse. He took off his jacket and remembered he did not bring a change of clothing, so he was going to have to get something local first chance he got.

His training as a KGB agent instantly came online once he landed. There were four hours between the landing and the smaller flight. He took that time to hunt around in the airport for vendors of more local attire. It did not take long for him to find some more comfortable shirts, slacks, and a bag to carry his gear. A pair of sunglasses and a white hat completed the ensemble.

Now, a bit more comfortable and armed with a selection of local toiletries, he cleaned up, changed, and was able to get to the airport runway with plenty of time. The doctor had managed to clean herself up, but it was obvious she had not slept on the flight over and was in need of rest.

A man from Russia got off the plane. Piotr noticed him at first and thought he was just a tourist. But the coincidence of his waiting for the same plane made him more suspicious. The man had the movement of a trained fighter; he walked on the balls of his feet. He kept his hands clear of his pockets. He sat with his back to the wall and faced the entire area.

Piotr tipped his hat forward and slumped his shoulders. The man’s gaze passed over him, stopped momentarily, and then moved on. He was looking for something, but Piotr did not know what that might be. Thirty minutes before the flight was due to leave, the small plane landed and taxied into the runway. A crew came out to refuel and inspect the plane. The pilot chatted with his relief, and then the preflight was underway.

The suspicious man began to move closer to the doctor, and she did not seem aware of his approach. Piotr also moved closer, sitting behind the two of them, hiding behind a magazine. He put his gun under his bag in the chair next to him.

“Dr. Mehta. I am going to have to ask you to come with me. British intelligence.” The man’s accent was certainly British, but there was something strange about it.

“Don’t you have to show me some ID or something?” Stephanie asked. She had a look of intense skepticism mixed with real fear. Something was definitely wrong, and she was completely out of her depth.

“Just come with me, miss, and we will sort this out in the customs office.” The “agent” reached out to grab her arm and move close to her. He whispered something, and Piotr knew what it was. He had a handgun pressed against her back.

“Excuse me,” Piotr stood up and in his thickest Russian accent asked, “Do you know what time our flight will be leaving?” He was certain they would have almost no chance of understand what he was saying.

“Sod off. I am busy with the lady.”

Piotr took off his hat and held his hand out to Stephanie. “My name is Piotr. And you are?” He could see the recognition and relief in her eyes. But he tried to transmit the idea that they were not out of the woods yet.

“Stephanie. Stephanie Mehta.”

“And your friend?”

“Her friend is telling you to mind your bloody business, Russian.”

“Or what will happen? You will make me eat some bland chips and tasteless fish from your country? Perhaps some of your beer that tastes like piss? My cat makes a stronger brand of beer in his litter box.”

Whoever this fellow was, he was not a member of British Intelligence. He lost his temper far too easily. Likely a mercenary. He brought his gun out from under his coat and redirected it at Piotr. Exactly as planned. Piotr stepped to the right of the gunman’s hand and with a single maneuver, relieved the man of his gun, breaking two of his fingers. His aggressive wristlock held the man and brought his arm behind his back in a breaking position. It happened so quickly, no one saw anything at all. Piotr handed the gun to Stephanie and used his other hand to pat the man down.

He wasn’t carrying anything else. His ID said his name was Howard Mason, but Piotr doubted the ID was real. Using his real Russian police ID, Mason was taken into custody, and Stephanie and Piotr were questioned by the local authorities. Many hours later, it was called an act of random violence, nothing more. But Piotr knew better. It was time to get some answers from the beautiful doctor.

When they were walking back to the smaller plane runway, Stephanie started talking. Piotr decided to keep his request simple and see what she had to say. “It started with the bees. Dr. Sheppard said he noticed first when colony collapse began to show up in the newspapers.”

“Who is Dr. Sheppard?” Piotr interrupted.

“He was the leader of the genetic engineering teams who pioneered the last great plant genome modifications. His work created the super-yield wheat, the rust resistant potatoes, the suicide seeds, and the natural insecticides common to almost all plants today. He worked for Consanko for nearly thirty years.”

“So your trip here has something to do with him?”

“I was reading the information on the flight here. It had been gathered and collated by two later scientists, peers who reviewed his papers and were not satisfied by his safety information. They spent the last fifteen years refuting his notes about the “restrictive coding” built into the gene maps of his genetic constructs. Their contention was that the genetic transform viruses and bacteria used to modify the plants was completely unable to be contained to that environment.”

“So this brings us back to the bees, yes?” She looked at him incredulously. “Yes, I went to school once upon a time.”

She continued. “Yes, this brings us back to the bees. They moved pollen from the genetically engineered plants, first to their hives, then to other plants. Which ultimately moved them to us. The first signs of the suicide genes were the failure of some bee colonies, as their queens became less able to reproduce stable colonies.”

“So now you think it has moved into the human population?”

“Correct. If what I have discovered is true, the human race will likely be extinct in less than one hundred years, and unable to reproduce in less than sixty. Consanko has put poison into the environment on every major land mass on Earth.”

“Then this explains why people are trying to kill you, Doctor. You know too much. So I assume this means we are going to talk to Doctor Sheppard?”

“If anyone knows what can be done to reverse this, he would be the one.”

The small plane captain started ushering people onboard, and the two of them sat in the back of the craft away from everyone else. Piotr put his gun in his lap under his hat. Stephanie curled up next to him and leaned onto his shoulder and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Piotr, already rested, considered what he knew about corporate politics and industrial espionage and hoped this would end better than this sort of thing usually did. On a good day, only bad people died. On a bad day, everyone did. He checked his backup piece, and stashed a huge knife under his shirt.

The flight, leaving late in the day, arrived eight hours later in the early morning in the small town of Quito, Ecuador. Stephanie woke, still looking tired and out of place. She is just a doctor who has been told the world is coming to an end, Piotr; how do you expect her to look? The only reason you don’t look like her is that your world came to an end a dozen years ago. She reminds you of Natalie. Enough of that; keep your mind in the game.

Two men met them at the runway. Piotr knew them well. It had been nearly eight years since he had been there, but these two were still working the rainforest, gathering intelligence on the two dozen corporations currently fighting over what was left of it. Javier and Hector Morales, two brothers who worked with the KGB and whose loyalties were relatively unquestioned, reported regularly, their intel was good, and they were able to keep their noses clean. This made them decent agents, and Piotr did not tell them anything more than that he needed a car and a decent local map. They didn’t know what he needed one for, and they didn’t care.

“Rasputin, you look terrible,” Javier began.

“How is that any different than normal?” Hector finished.

“It is good to see you two, as well. Did you get my request?”

“Yes, your dull agent made the request and was very clear about what he wanted. Do you really still use the Kinataci 4000 model? It’s nearly eight years old.” Javier smiled while he teased Piotr. “My wristwatch has more power than your agent.”

“Seriously, Piotr, we have children here in Ecuador who have better agents than that. Are you going to upgrade any time soon?” Hector handed Piotr the map pack and the car keys.

“And who is this lovely creature?” Hector muscled Javier out of the way as Stephanie approached the car after getting her bag.

“My name is Stephanie.” She shook hands and took in the quaint little airstrip on the edge of Quito. The car was something from earlier in the century; she did not recognize it, and thought it might actually still use some sort of petrochemical to power it.

“Rasputin, you did not tell us you would be bringing company. Keeping the good things to yourself, as usual.” Hector smiled, something honest and real, and Piotr realized they misinterpreted the relationship. Let it go.

“We have to get moving. When we get back, we will share a beer or something before we take off. Thanks for the save.”

“No problem. We are always here for you, Rasputin. You saved our lives, once. We owe you.”

The car was old and serviceable and started up immediately. Neither of them had much to say on the trip; it was hot and miserable and both had grown used to the dry heat of the Moscow summer. Here at the equator, the weather was always hot and wet, with seasonal showers every day at around eleven o’clock and again at three as the winds shifted.

The GPS on the map said they were nearing their destination. Stephanie realized this was likely the place because they started seeing a variety of hydroponic domes erected for what looked like miles in every direction. These domes were scattered within the forest canopy and seemed to be strangely porous, allowing trees to grow through them even as they defined an area, each with a sixty foot diameter at the bottom. The dome appeared to be grown and continued to grow with the plants around them. Most were opaque, but a few showed levels of transparency, and people were servicing the plants within.

The domes gave way to a series of smaller prefab buildings.  No security was visible, and a driveway with a number of other vehicles parked outside seemed a good place to start. They sat for a while, getting the rhythm of the place. Piotr made sure his guns were ready and scanned the grounds for anything out of place. Workers moving canisters on small flatbed trucks seemed to be the only road traffic. Occasionally, a larger twelve-wheeler would roll out or come back into the property.

A bearded man with graying hair got out of a vehicle near one of the campers, and Stephanie noticed him. He looked very similar to the photo she was shown on the video clip. She tapped Rasputin on the arm, and the two of them walked from the car to the prefab. When they got to the top of the stairs, Piotr entered first, and the small man was sitting behind the desk with his gun drawn and pointing at him.

“Please come in; your young friend, as well. I have been expecting you. Have a seat.”

Once they were inside away from the blistering sun, Stephanie welcomed the opportunity to take a seat. The sun seemed to drain the strength from her body. She did not even have the ability to maintain any concern about the firearm pointed in her direction. “Dr. Sheppard, I presume.”

Sheppard put the gun back into his desk and pointed to a small table in the back of his very organized office. “Please, have some water; you will find you sweat quite a bit more than you think here.”

After they had a glass of water, and then a second, Doctor Sheppard got down to business. “Did the company send you? I am surprised it took them this long to find me.”

“No, sir, we have come here at the request of Doctors Lawrence and Cloverfield. They said you would know why we were here.”

“Did they? Did they tell you what I am doing here?”

“No, they said you were no longer working for Consanko, and you expressed some level of regret for what happened.”

“Regret? No, my dear. Regret does not even begin to describe what I feel. I thought my work here might be enough. Would you like to see it? What about you, young man? You do not look like a scientist. If I were to try and read you, I would say a corporate hit man, government agent, possibly KGB, or if they are still in existence, a CIA agent.”

“Very good guess, Doctor. So why are you here? If you have regrets for your work, why retire to this place? You were a very rich man; you could be living anywhere.”

“The answer to your question lies out there. Are you rested enough for the tour? It’s the least you can do before you kill me.”

The three of them stepped out into the terrible heat of the day and strode toward one of the domes. “I made these domes myself. I designed them to absorb and convert the solar energy into a cooling chamber. I have patented the technology and am making a tidy fortune in the equatorial regions all over the globe.”

As they stepped through a simple series of flaps, Stephanie noted the vast difference in the internal temperature of the tent, and by the time they were inside the dome proper, the temperature was less than fifty degrees, nearly an eighty degree drop. The air was cool, even a bit damp, and over eighty percent of the sunlight had been dimmed, making the area just a bit brighter than sunset. Dr. Sheppard touched a small remote on his wrist and the dome became a bit brighter as the spines of the hexagonal shapes began to glow with a blue light.

“I could make the dome more transparent, but that would bring in more heat; I want to wait until this dome has been harvested. But the polymorphic materials used in the construction of this dome are grown into this location. See?” He pointed to the edge of the dome, and Stephanie could see the dome seemed to move into the ground. There were none of the seams she would have associated with a constructed work.

The material covering the hexagons was thick and a bit rough, and had a scaled appearance. “The scales are a polychromatic material capable of converting sunlight into electrical energy. That electricity is used to cool the tent as the fabric absorbs the energy of the air using superconductivity. The energy absorbed is redirected by an underground organic network to a power storage facility used to maintain all of the vehicles and other power needs here.”

“Why the strange design, growing them below the forest canopy?” Stephanie asked.

“Because they are not visible from space,” Piotr answered before the doctor could respond. “You said harvest, Doctor. What are you growing?” Piotr walked over to one of the trees and touched the strange formations growing on the trees and in the underbrush. “They look like mushrooms.”

“Very astute. Indeed they are mushrooms, mushrooms of my own design. What do you know about mushrooms?”

Piotr looked at Sheppard and answered. “I like them in my soups and on my steaks. Do I need to know more than that?”

Sheppard laughed and said, “No, I guess not. I hope you really like mushrooms, young man.”

“What are you talking about, Dr. Sheppard? I came here to discuss a means of reversing the birth reductions in the human and animal populations.”

“Young lady, when we first began our studies and first genetic experimentations, we were young and thought we were going to feed the world. We thought we would work with companies like Cansanko who would ensure that our patents would be protected, and we would be able to work with corporate backing. With their money and our skills, no problem of food production could confound us. But they had their own agenda. They rounded up seeds from all over the world and began to patent the seeds. The seeds! Can you imagine? We were outraged. Seeds belong to everyone, we said. They laughed and called us idealistic and told us to get back to work. We would have fewer complaints when we were rich.”

Dr. Sheppard found a chair near the monitoring station and raised the lighting a bit. The two of them saw dozens of varieties of mushrooms, all over the room. They had been walking inside a very limited area. Once there was more light, they saw a rainbow of mushrooms, some close to the ground, others towering at three and four feet, shelves of mushrooms growing on the sides of trees. Some of them appeared to be the classic shapes, but others looked like ocean waves, some like bushes, but they were all growing harmoniously, beautifully, together.  She had never seen anything like it.

“We went back to work, to increase the yield of our newly patented seeds. And with the revolutionary work of Dr. David Lawrence, we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. Every time we worked on a new patent, we felt like explorers, crossing boundaries we had never conceived of. We became gods, Promethean in our endeavors, with no thought to the consequences.”

Piotr heard the helicopter blades first. His training in war zones made him more alert. The others heard them soon enough.

“We don’t have much time. I have been expecting them. I thought you were going to kill me. But now I realize they have been reading my notes. You see, when we first started noticing the problem, they started burying my ideas. And when Laurence and Cloverfield’s work began to show we were wrong and there was the possibility of genetic pollution, they were killed.”

“I thought they were killed two days ago.” The look on Stephanie’s face was undecipherable.

“They were. Two days and five years ago. I left the company in disgust and refused to do any more work once I had seen the error of my ways. The company refused to acknowledge my work until recently. Now I suspect they want my help. The work we did was revolutionary, and they killed the only two other people who really understood it.”

“Then who sent me this message?”

“I did.” Dr. Sheppard stared hard at Stephanie. “I need you to finish my work here. I need someone young and idealistic, someone who believes in a future worth fighting for. I need you here to fight for the present while I try and redeem myself and the future of humanity. I wish I had some words that would ease the years ahead. But I don’t. Our pride has led to the fall of our species. I hope I live long enough to make it right. I am an old man, a stupid old man.”

“What about Helmut? What happened to him?”

“He had begun his own investigation. I did not find his data flags because he was pursuing a different angle. By the time I realized what he was doing, they were already on to him. I am sorry for your loss.” Stephanie realized that she did not kill Helmut with her research. This only increased her grief.

The helicopters were close enough to begin landing, and the dome began to vibrate with their approach.

Sheppard stood up and walked over to the two of them. “The pollution has spread to all crops everywhere. What Consanko did not release and does not want people to know is that all of their original source seed has been corrupted, as well. So they have been selling seed for the last decades, but the seeds they are selling are the last of their kind from the last stockpiles of any seed on Earth. None of it has the ability to create new seeds. What you and your team don’t find on your own, won’t be found. Mushrooms will feed some of humanity, but our conservative estimates are that more than two thirds of the human race will die of starvation.”

Sheppard looked up and tears flowed from his eyes. “I need you to finish what I have started here. Everything you need is here; all the command codes have already been transferred to you. I have done all of the heavy lifting. All you need to do is teach humanity what we have done here.”

Walking toward the door, Sheppard stopped and looked back, wiping his face. “You were worried about humanity not having a future in a hundred years. I am going to leave here and go with those men landing outside, because if I don’t, humanity won’t have a future in less than ten years. Good luck.”

mushroomdiversity

Suicide Seed, Hayward’s Reach © Thaddeus Howze 2011, All Rights Reserved

Übermensch

Posted by Ebonstorm on March 24, 2013
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Messerschmitt_Me_262A_at_the_National_Museum_of_the_USAF

a tale of hayward’s reach

I found her behind our lines in a field not too far from a downed Messerschmidt Me 262. We had pushed the Germans back out of Paris and had retaken the countryside in early September. I thought she was a local who had been injured when the plane crashed into her house, but she seemed shell-shocked and could barely speak. She was staggering around in some colorful rags and we took her into the improvised field hospital.

We did not have any doctors yet, it was still too soon after taking the territory, so I was the lead medic in charge. We lost Jenkins, the only other medic, so I was working two shifts tending the wounded as best I could. Ronowski was a good kid with his hands so I put him to work cleaning and tending lesser injuries while I did what I could for those who looked like they might make it.

The camp was an old church that hadn’t taken too many bullets and kept us out of the rain. It rained nearly every day. The Parisians were nice though and shared what little food there was. No one knew the strange woman, so we assumed she wandered from a nearby province.

She was a right pretty thing, five foot ten, but in her shocked state she seemed diminished and she let me lead her quietly. A French woman, Martinique, likely a Resistance member helped me tend her and we put her in the back rooms of the church.

After we cleaned her up, we noticed she did not have a scratch on her, even though her clothing had been destroyed, she was unmarked. We tried every language we could scrounge up in camp, but she did not seem to have any words at all.

We went out to check through the wreckage of the Messerschmitt and marveled at its technology. We took sketches of the design of the vehicle, its engine and the strange containment devices that were in the bomb bays. Both were broken but they did not appear to be bombs. Once we were done, we returned to the church. We were expecting to be reinforced.

Later that evening, we made a breakthrough with the blond haired woman. After saying my name and tapping my chest, she finally seemed to get some sort of recognition. She tapped herself and said “Helga.”

After that, she became a member of the camp, helping with anything and everything. She still didn’t talk much but she would smile and occasionally laugh if others were. She followed Martinique around everywhere and the woman graciously tolerated it.

A week after Helga got here, she came running to me and grabbed me. She tried to draw me with her. I picked up my rifle and told Lewis and Franklin to come with me. We double-timed it to a barn and what we saw inside stopped us in our tracks.

We opened fire on it without even questioning what it was because it was ripping Martinique’s chest open and eating her vitals. At first glance I would have thought it was an insect except it was the size of a man, and its claws were tearing through Martineque’s bones as if they were twigs.

Our bullets bounced off its shell as if it were armored. It drew its antenna back and turned around, broke down the wall of the barn and sped off down the road.

Lewis pulled Helga away from Martinique. He said, “what the hell was that?”

My mind was racing, in this war, I had seen a lot of things but nothing like that. “I don’t know, but when it comes back, I intend to give it a much warmer reception.”

“How do you know its going to come back, Sarge?”

I looked at both of them and then looked down at Martiniques’ body. “Because we are where the food is. We are the food.”

We got the townspeople together and explained to them what happened. They did not believe it at first, until the saw the body, and a barn full of holes and no target. I thought until our reinforcements arrived, we would be better off if we stayed closer together, so we took over the small number of homes near the church and established a perimeter and guards. Everyone was issued a weapon and taught how to use it. No one was go anywhere alone. Helga was the only person who did not have a weapon, she refuse to even touch one. After Martinique’s death, she would talk to no one, nor stay with anyone but me.

We put a call out on the radio, trying to get an ETA on the backup but we were told it would be a couple more days, so we would just have to tough it out and make due. We put a machine gun nest in the center of the complex to offer a complete field of fire and had snipers in two of the tallest buildings. Nothing we could do but wait. It didn’t take long.

I am not sure what made me go out that evening but I felt compelled to walk the perimeter and talk to the men. They were in good spirits and except for the two who had seen it, joked about the idea of a bug hunt. As I was walking back to the church I had the strangest sensation of being watched. I turned to look down the road but I couldn’t see anything. I slept with a pistol in my hand.

Around 0400 hours, I heard gunfire, and sat up off of the pew I was sleeping on. It was rifle fire, likely one of the patrols. Then I heard the screaming and I was up and running.

There were only twenty soldiers left and they were all accounted for, so it was likely one of the locals. We ran out and made it as far as the central machine gun station, when one of the snipers launched a flare. We saw Jean-Claude, one of the cooks, running toward us and then before he could move more than a dozen steps, he was sliced in half from behind. The insect was back, and he brought friends. Dozens of them.

Williams, our church sniper had already begun firing and the rest of us bellied up to the sandbags at the machine-gun nest and opened fire with our M1 rifles. Our bullets struck the creatures but only the machine gun seemed to have the power to bring them down easily.

“Concentrate your fire in pairs. Snipers, cover fire only. Somebody get me a damn grenade.”

“Coming at ya, Sarge.”

One of these cockroach looking things made a dash across the courtyard toward the church and began to climb the wall toward the sniper position.

We tried to knock it down but the armor on its back was too strong.

“Petrelli, there is one coming up the wall right at you!”

There was a scream as the monster crested the wall and a single shot.

Petrelli looked over the wall, gave the thumbs up and kept firing. We held the ground until dawn and had taken no casualties. Or so we thought. When we canvased the area, there were three spots where human blood had been spilled but no humans were found. There were dozens of creatures killed, but they took the bodies, every single one, except for Petrelli’s kill. Then the real bad news followed.

“All of the food in the camp is gone, Monsieur. I don’t know how they did it, but there is nothing left anywhere. The grounds are picked clean. Only what we had with us in the church is left. They ate every chicken, every goat, every wheel of cheese anywhere.” Pierre was beside himself.

Corporal Lewis and Petrelli had taken the body of the monster from the roof and were looking it over for weaknesses. We looked at our ammo and realized we could not have another fire-fight like last night. We simply did not have enough ammo. Only the machine was without fear of running out. The rest of us were down to fifty or sixty rounds apiece. That would not last long in a sustained firefight.

“Right between the center of the head seems to work best.” Petrelli’s New York accent was thick and it was something the group used to tease him about. “I guess that works no matter who youse are.” They laughed. But real fear crossed all of their faces.

“I think we are going to have to make a stand here inside the church. Its got the strongest walls and the fewest windows. I want you to board up everything you can. Use the pews and anything else you can scavenge from town. They don’t seem to like the light so avoid the shadows. Remember, they got Martinique when she surprised one in the barn.”

“Sarge, I have an idea.”

“I’m all ears, Lewis.”

“Maybe we can lure them where we want them. And use something besides bullets to kill them. We don’t have napalm but we do have gasoline so we could make Molotov cocktails. They seem as flammable as anything else.”

“Fine, get a detail and get on it. But that is a plan that will happen while they are far away and while we still have lots of bullets. No sense having any flaming ones running through the camp.”

The next few hours were desperate as we did our best to fortify our positions before nightfall. Helga seemed strange and distracted but she worked as hard as anyone to prepare before dark.

We were hunkered down with two squads outside on rooftops for sniping and close protection. We were using shotguns, inside the church and had built a bunker in the center. Our more powerful weapons were outside to try and kill the larger and more aggressive creatures first. Both groups outside could see and cover each other, and had plenty of flares to get through the night if necessary. We had also stationed lanterns down the road and anywhere else we thought the creatures might come from.

With no more food left in town, we knew they would be coming for us.

They came after midnight. They were not shy, they simply came right down the street, one after another, they came down every street from every direction. We shot flares, we threw Molotovs, we burned them, we shot them, we stoned them with traps, they fell into pits, and they still kept coming.

We fought them until four. They would fight, close us retreat, and they did this again and again. Our bullets grew lower and lower. We would soon be down to handguns and shot guns. The two machine guns were still loaded but when they started shooting it took everything we had to keep the enemy off of them. We were down to our last grenades as well. One or two more waves and we would be fighting them hand to hand.

Sniper Team Alpha died first. The creatures saved the best for last. Some of them could fly. They swooped down and simply picked them off in rapid succession. The men managed to kill three more before being dragged away into the darkness. We provided cover for Sniper team Bravo, and pulled them into the church. Our last machine-gun was setup in the doorway to the church which faced the street.

He ran out of bullets at five to five. Our shotguns held them at bay, lacking the power they made up for it in damage dealing. By five thirty we had killed sixty or so right up to the walls of the church. The waves had stopped. It seemed only the last of the creatures were coming. But these were bigger and tougher and could only be killed with a direct close hit to their chest or face. If you were that close you were likely to be getting killed. Petrelli bought it like that. Shot one bastard clean in the head and was sliced apart for his troubles. I want to go like that. Clean.

We had put the townspeople behind us in the church with small arms and they helped when they could. Suddenly the wall behind us exploded and they were being grabbed and dragged away. Helga leaped into the crowd of the creatures and began to bludgeon them with her fists.

Each hit caused a creature to explode into blobs of disgusting flesh. We did not know what we were seeing and we did not care. The last twelve of us rushed up behind her and pointed our shotguns into the masses wherever she wasn’t. One of the biggest of the bastards, grabbed her with his claws and I expected him to rip her apart like Petrelli. She screamed and the sound literally turned him into jelly before our eyes.

We fought for another hour, the creatures must have been desperate because they kept coming and fought more savagely, with greater rage. We lost five more after that. All but seven of the twenty townspeople were lost or missing.

Helga seemed to be slowing down, her strength waning. But she did not stop and neither did we. We were so focused that I did not see one coming in behind us. It was a big one. Lewis having only one grenade left, threw himself onto the creature and the grenade detonated under him. Blasting the creature and us. No one saw Helga move. One second she was outside, the next she was in front of me. She took shrapnel that was meant for me.

She fell back into my arms and looked at me. There were shrapnel wounds in her chest, stomach and legs. I could hear small arms going on behind me but they gradually stopped. I looked at her and wondered where she came from, who she was, what she was. And none of that mattered. She saved us.

They told me later, she was a prototype of a German super-soldier that was intercepted and shot down near us. The insects were also a weapon, likely on the same craft. It seemed her memory had been lost in the crash and she only remembered her name. There was some talk of taking her body and dissecting it for science, but no one could find her when they went looking for her later.

When the war ended, we heard of several super-soldiers who had been released into the war, but were all believed to have been destroyed or killed depending on their nature. I returned home, tired from the war, just wanting to forget it happened. My parents had taken care of my little house and it was just the way I remembered it. I flopped down onto my bed and remembered Helga. A wind whipped up and the tree outside my window shook its leaves. The window opened up and a woman landed gently on my bedroom floor.

“We are no longer enemies. And I have never forgotten your kindness.”

I ran to her and she swept me up in her powerful arms. How does one begin to forget a goddess? I did not intend to even try.

Übermensch © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Image: DAYTON, Ohio — Messerschmitt Me 262A at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Pax Cyridian

Posted by Ebonstorm on March 8, 2013
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

ScreenHunter_285 Mar. 08 15.17

a tale of the Twilight Continuum

Hanging from the side of a building, cloaked in shadow, I could see the lights from the police roachsters sweeping the warehouse district and knew that we could not stay here long. I tried to visualize a route that would take me back to the city core but from here, every route was the longest route. Cyridian was not made for ease of driving but for optimal grazing for our bugs to maintain their bulk and their health.

Cyridian was designed by the city’s founders to be as ecologically friendly as possible with the industrial complexes as far from the city’s living quarters as possible. Closer to the inner rings were the commercial and educational service areas and then within the center of the city were the living quarters for bugs and people in the direct center.

I patted the internal dash of my Bug and she warmed the internal energy centers of her power plant. She did not activate her bright-lights, she was a nocturnal species capable of seeing easily in the dark. I put on my sensor band, so I could see what she was seeing. Her vision spanned the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums, she was an omnivore, so she hunted and foraged on plants when other prey was not available.

“Run, run?”

“Not yet.”

“Far to run. Must run soon.”

“Stay still. We have to wait until the time is right.”

“Wait, wait.”

She was never the most patient vehicle. Her parent insects were adapted because they were strong and amazingly intelligent. She was one of the few breeds capable of true interaction. For most people Bugs were just an analog for machines. So much so, they used the default activation codes designed by the breeders. “Bug On,” was the code phrase used to activate the systems of the Bug control interface. Most never created or updated the control system or password. It was not for security, because no one stole here, it would have been to personalize or empathize with the vehicle.

Cyr-Bugs were never truly embraced by most of the humans of Cyridian. Our subtle racial dislike of insects followed us from Earth. Despite the fact that the Cyridian insects have allowed us to have a lifestyle that embraced nature, remain peaceful and have a life completely dedicated to living in harmony with the world, many Cyridians were never in love with our symbiotic partners.

“Okay Ona, go fast to quadrant seven. Stay off the road.”

“Bump, bump, okay Penrose?”

“Yes, Ona, bump, bump. I am strapped in.”

Ona stretched her legs and tumbled into the underbrush. It was a very bumpy and rough ride. But the advantage was hers because the police roaches simply had to go around. Around on Cyridian meant many miles of alternative pathways like an old maze puzzle. Ona rarely got to travel this way because my job simply did not give me the time to let her roam like I would have wanted. As a matter of fact, it’s my job that put me in this position in the first place. I am a gene-engineer. I change bugs into conveniences for the people of the Empire. I’m not used to people shooting at me, or trying to kill me. Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order. I went to work this morning…

“Penrose, I’m seeing some organic components missing from your warehouse stockpiles,” shouted my boss from his desk pit. He didn’t even wait for me to slide into my desk before making demands. I saw that Barry, my co-engineer, hadn’t even shown up for work yet. Brown-nosing the boss does have its perks.

“I’m right on it. It has to do with the last alterations I made to the Series 19 upgrades. I will check the data right after I grab some crabs.”

“Bring me a couple back,” he mumbled and went back to whatever he was doing on his multiple terminals. Passing his pit, I looked down and saw some new recombinations he was working on, ugly designs to my sense of aesthetics but he had customers who loved his carapace work.

I tapped into my desk system as I walked by and looked at the reports he flagged in my heads up display. I didn’t recognize any of these requests. I got to the kitchen and picked up five or six crabs, a local insect delicacy, flash fried and coated in a dusting of sugar.

“Run a trace on these requisitions, please.” My computer would put a marker out on them and inform me where the organic components went. It was a bit of a concern because of the quantities being rerouted. Enough for fifteen or twenty Bugs. The components were the organic interfaces used to control or interact with a Bug’s system.

Since many of the systems in our buildings were created with or by or supported by the local insects, any that require our interaction had to be fitted with a control interface. The control interface technology was one of the things we created here.

The flag came up indicating the resources ended up in a facility at the very edge of the city, about fifty klicks from here, as the dragon flies. Driving will take about one hundred klicks. “Boss, I’m going to have to go out there. The system that authorized it requires a personal code to access. I am going to have go during working hours, because they barely have any comm systems out there at all. It’s one of the newer installations.”

“Do what you need to Penrose. I have seven new carapaces I need you to look at before you go, though. Can you do it at lunch?”

I had left Ona out to graze and found her sitting in a field, eating into a nest of what we called su-mona. They resembled Terran termites in that they burrowed underground and fed on woody materials. But each was the length of a man’s arm and had complexes that could spread for dozens of miles. They were a primary source of food for Ona’s species and one of her personal favorites.

The park center was a common grazing area and without the constant effort of Bugs, it would grow out of control in a matter of days.

“Penrose, I found su-mona, want to share?”

“No thank you, Ona. Will you be done soon? We have a trip to go on.”

“A long one, yes?”

“Very. Over two hours.”

“Can Ona run?

“As fast as you like.” She hurriedly chomped down the rest of her termites. There was goo all over her face. Using her pelipaps, she wiped it away as quickly as she can she said, “Ona is finished.”

I climbed into the carapace chamber organically crafted out of her mighty exoskeleton. I slid in and she formed a ridge to support my back. I put on my sensor band and could see the road through her eyes. She took off down the road at over 95 kilometers per hour.

When we arrived at the warehouse, it was mid afternoon, there had not been much traffic, so Ona really could move as fast as she wanted. It had been great to allow her to show off her speed. She was not nearly as fast as roaches who could reach speeds of 150 kph, but only for short bursts. Ona could do what she did all day long. Beyond the edge of the city, her ancestors still roamed free and could be quite dangerous to visitors of our world.

If you came to live on Cyridian you were given genetic modifiers which made you emit an odor considered unpleasant to most of the more aggressive animals of the planet, and armed with Bospor stingers, you were safe from the rest that might still eat you.

The warehouse was closed up and no staff was available to accept my query for entry. I slid out of Ona and walked up to the wall of the warehouse. The building was created out of the traditional silkstone but it seemed to have other properties. I licked the building and my chemical mods indicated there were traces of other toxins on the outside of the building. I was immune to anything the planet had to offer. I had to be to work with the number of toxic insects we handled to do our jobs. I found the toxin to be a strange one because it was not found in most of the insects local to the area.

Ona normally settled into grazing once we arrived at an area, but she seemed reluctant to move from where she stopped. She waved her palps around and put them into her mouth to taste the air.

“Ona? What’s wrong?”

“Bad genes here.”

“Whose work is it. Is it mine or Barry?”

“Barry’s taste.”

Each engineer has a signature to their work. There are only five or six of us in Cyridian and we have marked our work to ensure stability and accountability in design.

“Trouble. Danger.” That made me nervous. Ona is one of the larger and more dangerous predators on this planet. If she was worried, we might be in trouble.

I walk back to Ona when two roachsters pull up behind her and two law enforcement agents got out of the vehicles. Ona turned around and eyed them. The roaches were calm and did not respond to her veiled threat. “Can we help you Gene-engineer?”

“What seems to be the problem, officer? I came out here to investigate a technical requisition supply issue.”

“This warehouse is restricted.” The officer seemed strange to me. He kept his hand on his Bospor pistol. The second officer stayed next to his roachster.

“Perhaps I have been misinformed.” Ona, bristled when I walked back to her.

“Penrose. Not good. Something wrong.”

“I know, but we have to go.”

Then there was a booming from the warehouse behind us. The roachsters backed up with the amazing speed they are capable of. Ona leapt away from the warehouse and landed facing it.

“Okay, that doesn’t sound normal.”

“We are going to have to ask you to leave, sir.”

The booming happened again but this time the wall exploded open and the law enforcement officer is crushed instantly by the falling wall debris. The speed at which it happened shocked me, but Ona was already in motion. She grabbed me and wrapped me in the energy dampening material inside her chassis and backed away from the hole. The other officer got out of his roachster with his Bospor pistol drawn.

The creature that came out appeared to be a variant on Ona’s design but much bigger. The modifications included increased chassis armor, stronger leg designs and several other surface mods I did not recognize. But I knew weapon work when I saw it. This was an illegal mod.

“Run, run, Penrose?”

“No Sweetie, not yet.”

The second officer jumped out of his roachster. He directed the first roachster to try and remove the debris from his downed partner. The roachster tried to lift the debris, but it was designed for speed not strength. The illegally modified creature looked out of the hole at the roachster and roared.

The officer fired on the creature. The Bospor pistol launched a round from the gun with a huff of highly compressed air. The Bospor stinger flew at over eight hundred feet per second. The tiny blob landed on the creature. Nothing happened.

Impossible.

The Bospor was the most toxic animal on the planet. Quiet scavengers, nothing ate them and they were non-aggressive. Their only defense is their deadly neurotoxin launched with series of gas-launched spines. The powerful neurotoxin kills everything with a nervous system on Cyridian. It is why they we modified them as weapons.

“Now we run, Ona.”

The gene-mod opened one of its ports on the side of its massive body and a coughing ejection of phlegm struck the officer. He began to smoke and scream immediately and ran backward until he fell down. Then he turned into a pile of smoking organic mess. The creature coughed again and one roachster was struck in the side, the other backed up and turned its turret on to the gene-mod. It fired two chemical backed Penranol projectiles. Both organic projectiles struck the gene-mod. One bounced off of the dense carapace, the other stuck and burst into flame. I had seen enough.

We ran as fast as we could. When we reached the next civilized part of the industrial area we tried to call back to my office with no success. Barry might have already left. I tried to reach his comm badge but he didn’t answer. I heard the alarms of roachsters as they approached our position. Ona began to fidget and I touched her to calm her down. As the roachsters surrounded us, I began to get the impression something was terribly wrong.

Barry gets out of one of the roachsters. “Hello, Penrose. I see you found out about my project.”

“That monstrosity is yours? What happened to do as little harm as possible?”

“That was before Venris Tel Corp offered me 50 million credits to build them an organic tank. Then it became “Do less harm to your planet and more to others for the proper funding.” Barry sneered at me. “You think you’re better than me.”

“You realize you just confessed?”

Barry looked around at the cops and laughed. “These guys? They work for me. They help me keep things under control and they get a nice piece of the action.”

“Penrose…” began Ona

“Not now, Ona.”

“You and your talking car. You talk about me, but making a car that talks is the real crime.”

“It’s because they are not cars, they are living things. That’s what happened on Earth, we began to treat the world as a commodity.”

“So you make your freak car?”

“Yes, I wanted something that I didn’t have to say ‘Bug On’ to get it to activate to.”

“Penny…”

“Not now, Ona.”

“No matter, what I’ve done will make me fantastically rich, but only if you don’t survive to tell people. Gentlemen, if you please.”

I began to hear a rumbling sound, rhythmic and growing stronger, fast. The roachsters turned to face down the road and put their bright-lights onto the road.

“Penny, we should go.”

“Yes, Ona, I think you’re right.”

The Gene-mod barreled into the center of the roachsters, shooting its acidic phlegm with abandon. Ona had backed up away from the road, until she was out of line of sight. The acid bombs landed on several of the roachsters and their agonized shrieks filled the air. The gene-mod had a burn all over its top carapace but was otherwise undamaged. It barreled into the other roachsters and there was the brittle sound of carapace against carapace contact.

The roachsters chosen for their speed and savage temperament slashed into the gene-mod and the battle was joined. Ona and I used the distraction of them fighting for their lives to run for ours.

We managed to make it to the working ring and I tried to reach the Central Administrator. I left Ona to graze while I made my way into the building complex. Barry, being my boss had rescinded my access to the office. I would have to make a run to the center of the city.

I could see the headlights of the roachsters searching for me. I guessed that meant Barry was still alive. We turned into the park and made good time. We stayed off the roads where the roachsters had a speed advantage and crept the city’s overgrown grazing areas. I had to put a visit into the Sector Chief, personally. She lived in the central region, on the west side.

It took us fifty minutes and four close calls before I had to leave Ona at the edge of the center region. The roads were pedestrian friendly but less so for Bugs.

“You wait here, Ona. Stay under cover. I’ll be back for you soon.”

“Okay, Penrose. I wait here.”

I started toward Lanris Corli’s place and realized I didn’t know what I was going to tell her. I didn’t have any evidence. Using the scent glands of the Pinaris beetles we created organic street lights by attracting and feeding the bioluminescent insects over certain areas of the street. We used other kinds of glow-paint for areas that needed to stay lit but relatively insect free. It took me about five minutes to reach her domicile, a lovely spincast place made from the silk of a Wayran moth, one of the projects I headed years ago. I knocked on the door. It took about a minute for her to answer.

“Gene-engineer Penrose at your service, ma’am.”

“Cut the crap, Penrose, why are you at my door this late?”

“Well, I have evidence of a plan to weaponize our technology and sell it off-planet.”

The sleepy look vanished from her face. In retrospect, I think I should have paid closer attention.

“Come in Gene-engineer. Let me get dressed. Tell me the rest.”

She invited me in and vanished into her bedroom. I explained about the gene-mod and it’s rampage. When she came back out she was dressed in her Civil servant uniform of blue and gold. She was also carrying a stylish chemical pistol of Old Earth manufacture.

“I didn’t want this, Penrose. We were trying to get them off planet, before anyone noticed. If we could’ve had one breeding pair and the gene-mods no one would have been the wiser.”

“There is more than one of those things? I guess this means you have to kill me, now.”

“It doesn’t have to be, there are potentially several clients who would pay for our genetic technology, which has no equal in the Empire. Killing you would be a waste of a very important irreplaceable resource.”

“So why the gun?”

“I can’t have you running out of here before you hear my offer. There are always other administrators you could have confessed to who would been appalled to know what you just suggested to me.”

“You could have gone the seduction route? Made me believe we were going to be friends. After befriending me you could have killed me. It’s what the Nornian spider does with its multiple mates over the course of its lifetime.”

“You need to get out more.” Her phone rang. “I see. I will take care of it.” She hung up. “Barry’s dead. It looks like your value just shot up. But we have a problem.”

Pointing at the gun, “I’d say we have two. If you plan on having my help, you need to put that away. Its making me nervous. You won’t like me nervous.”

“It’s my insurance, don’t get any ideas. The gene-mod is out of control and heading toward the center complex. If anyone gets a clear look at it, we might be in trouble. The police will open a breach in the shield and attract some native fauna in. We’ll claim this creature is one of them and cover it up before anyone can investigate.”

“I want Barry’s share.”

“Getting bold, are we?”

“No, I am thinking I won’t have much of a career on Cyridian before this is over, so I’m just thinking ahead. Especially if I help you with this.”

“Alright, let’s go.” As we stepped out of the doorway into the courtyard, the streetlights flickered. The streetlights were comprised of clouds of the local fireflies, genetically inclined to stay near pheremone emitting sites scattered throughout the city. Working with nature, we don’t imprision the insects. They were free to come and go but between the pheremone and the nectar, they provide light sufficient for our modified vision. Then the lights went out. But that only happened when a predator approached. Lanris had only a split second of warning. She looked up right before the gene-mod landed its massive bulk right on top of her head, killing her instantly. She managed to get off a single shot.

In that split second, when the lights fled, before it arrived, I realized what was happening and leaped into the brush, running for my life. They made the damn thing able to fly? What were they thinking? And with a stealth mode, no less? That was insane!

The gene-mod was right on my tail. It knocked down trees and steel-like bamboos as if they weren’t even there, fibrous splinters raining down all around me. I could smell its power plant, it was overheating, flying was probably not the ideal movement for it. If I ran fast enough, maybe it would run out of energy and have to stop and rest.

Yeah, right.

I could hear it getting closer and closer, I looked back only once and could see it’s crazed look as its bright-lights locked onto my position, I ran into the brush to obscure its vision, even for second. If I could just make it back to the park, I could hide from it. It had no major sensory mods I could see, so I could escape while the police, the real police handled it.

But I wasn’t going to make it. I could smell it just seconds from me. There was a crashing sound coming from my left and a tree dropped right behind me. It caused the gene-mod a moment of hesitation, but it bit right through the tree. Then another tree landed behind me and a third.

Who is throwing trees behind me?

When I came to the clearing where Bugs awaited their owners, there were no Bugs there, including my own? Where was she? It was not like her to move too far once I told her I was coming back. She would have stayed near a feeding station. I was going to die here. On level ground there was no way I could outrun it.

I turned and ran anyway. I heard the buzz of two approaching roachsters. I did not know whose side they were on, so I just ran away from them too as the gene-mod burst out of the underbrush. These weren’t just roachsters, these were Hunter-seekers, killers designed to destroy bugs that breached the shield. They were big, strong and fast, some of the deadliest things we ever engineered. So dangerous, they were only released into areas that had been overrun because they killed everything they came in contact with. Once they had neutralized all threats, they were destroyed with internal toxin bombs. One-use creatures unable to be bred, except under the most ideal conditions. There were never more than four or five available any more since we perfected the shield and pheromone technologies.

With lightning speed, they turned their attention to the gene-mod with their bright-lights flashing all over the area as they battled the monster. Their flashing blade mouths, tried to cut into the carapace of the gene-mod but most of their blows were scratches in comparison to the injuries it dealt. But these were no ordinary roachsters. Their nervous systems amped to the highest degree, most of the gene-mod’s attacks missed their mark fully.

But the battle was far from equal. I looked on in horror as the full extent of the gene-modifications began to show. It began to regenerate its injuries. Regeneration was rarely added to any genestruct because there were too many potentials we wanted to avoid. Unnecessary cancers and ‘regrettable immortality’. Cells that divide too often sometimes became cancerous. And immortality can be inconvenient if you were seeking to kill a creature to prevent it from passing on its immortal genes. The potential to destabilize an ecosystem was too great, hence its name ‘regrettable immortality’.

I hoped the police were trying to get something bigger to fight with because with the venom, acid, armor, speed, flight and regeneration mods this thing was boasting, it would kill us all before the next day was done. One Hunter-killer went down under the super-strong legs of the gene-mod, speared through in four places and pinned into the spin-crete beneath.

I couldn’t think of anything I could do to stop this. While the last Hunter-killer got a few more wounds in, the brush behind it began to move. I saw several Beetles, the most common of the auto-bugs used here. Each is carrying a tree in its front leg set. They surround and set upon the gene-mod with the trees, each swinging the tree limb as if it were a willow wand. The concussive booms stagger the gene-mod with each blow, but it continues its relentless assault on the Hunter-Killer.

Then I saw Ona. She came out of the forest and she was singing. Rubbing her pelipaps together she makes a series of strange but beautiful sounds, and when she does the other auto-bugs increase their assault. The gene-mod turns and grabs one of the auto-bugs, a female, and sprays it’s toxic venom. She screamed horribly, convulsing while she died.

The others hesitated and the Hunter-Killer got in a final strike before it was cut in half by the slashing jaws of the gene-mod. It struck the genestruct in the eye with its sword-like forearms. The strike is deep, a few inches to the left and it could have been mortal. The Hunter-Killer’s arm broke off and the sword-like claw remained embedded in the eye socket of the gene-mod. The other auto-bugs renewed their attacks but not nearly as durable as the Hunter-Killer, each was cut down, one after the other.

Once it’s done, it turned toward me and advanced slowly. There were only a few times I had regretted my occupation. Once, before I was completely gene-modified to live on Cyridian, I was working with a spasm-fly and was bitten. No one knew I hadn’t completed my modification so I spent a half a year in a spasm chamber, immobilized in a stasis field so my muscles didn’t pull the flesh from my bones. That was the lowest point in my technical career. I had few other regrets. The occasional lack of family bit deep, but with my gene-mods, I would live to be a nice two hundred or so, (or would have until today) so I always thought I would have time.

The gene-mod approached and I knew I was seconds from death. The only question was how. Venom? Acid? Stomped to death? I hoped it would be quick. I was not looking forward to be stomped to death. Then I heard that whistle again and the gene-mod turned again.

Ona. What was she thinking?

It turned away and I could feel my bowels growing weak. Being close to dying really made bodily control a challenge.

Ona stepped away from the brush and approached the gene-mod. But she was bigger, redder, and her eyes had a particular gleam I had never seen before. Then I remembered. This was her maternal combat mode. Mothers, when their young are in trouble, change and become dangerous killing machines. On this world, multiply that by five.

She flew.

I mean, I knew she could do it, I had just never seen it. She flew fast. She slammed into its side and knocked it off its feet. Ona is big, much bigger than the roachsters, and she used her bulk to her advantage. She landed on its underside and stabbed her sword-like pedipalps into it undercarriage, near the base of the legs, and severed its ability to control two of those legs. She bounded away as it uses its outer carapace wings to flip itself over.

It landed with a grunt and fluids sprayed out from underneath its legs, the two damaged ones are barely able to hold up the carapace in the back of the creature. Its carapace was dragging the ground. It’s down but not out.

The genestruct turned to face Ona with its good eye and I am on its blind side with the sword hanging out its eye. As long as the claw remained in its eye, it could not regenerate the tissue. The creature sprayed both venom and acid from its weaponized glands. Ona leaps forward dodging the venom but getting hit with the acid. Using her strong back legs, she sliced forward and cut off the wing casing covered with acid. She howled, a sound I have never heard her make before.

She and the genestruct circled each other and tentatively attacked each other but neither has an advantage. Ona was slowing Her injuries were taking a toll on her. The genestruct was slowly regenerating and soon able to raise itself on its hind legs. Ona scurried around onto its blind side and rushed it, slashing along the region between the carapace and the legs. She is able to get a good and solid wound. The beast roars and explodes into action. It cut deeply into her side armor, pushed her back before it moved away from her. She had damaged it seriously. The genestruct stopped moving and fell over with one set of legs unable to move. Ona was badly hurt as well. She bled from a dozen injuries all over her carapace and undercarriage. I ran over to her and tried to stop the bleeding.

“Penrose, run, run.”

“I can’t Ona. I can’t leave you. Now get up. We have to go.”

“Penny, I can’t run. Go now. Ona loves you. Ona dies for you.”

The silence was oppressive. It was never quiet on Cyridian. Insects were always talking here. Anything near this battle realized they were in the presence of something terrible and hoped to avoid drawing attention to itself. Even scavengers, normally bold, made no attempt to approach. Ona’s quiet and ragged breathing was the only thing I could hear. Her internal plant was already offline.

Then the sound of a powerplant restarting echoed across the forest. The brightlights of the genestruct came back on. Weak and flickering, but they slowly got stronger. I hear the coughing of the acid cannon being prepared to fire. I couldn’t let that happen. Ona couldn’t move yet.

I jumped up and tried to draw its fire. Confused and with only one good eye, it chose me and fired. The acid blob, hit the ground near me and part of the splash landed onto my uniform. Designed with genetic constructs in mind, the uniform neutralizes most of it, but the quantity overwhelms it and my flesh bore the rest. The pain was excruiating. I fell forward as my legs gave out, face down into the underbrush.

But for the first time since it happened, I was glad of the spasm-fly attack. I was in stasis for six months. During that entire time, my nervous system was under assault, being constantly stimulated without relief, everyday until it was brought under control. I learned my threshold for pain. And while this certainly was terrible, it was nothing compared to that six months.

I screamed. I cursed, I raged. And I got up.

“I’ve had about enough of you.” The gene-mod coughed, and sputtered as it tried to repair itself. I could hear its power plant as it struggled to stay online.

It was dying.

I limped up to its blind side, and I could hear its inquiry sounds as it tried to figure out where I was. I knew these sounds. It was looking for someone to help it. Designed to have someone support it, its injuries led it to believe someone should be helping to repair it and those chirps of query meant it was expecting someone.

I saw the Hunter-Killer leg hanging out of its ocular cavity. I reached up, grabbed the end of the leg, and reorienting it, pointed it directly into its brain. The thrust is brief and the green ichor of the construct’s blood covered me in one final surge.

It did not resist. There was a sound like a sigh of relief and the creature eased itself into a resting position. I looked at the creature and saw it was covered with pain mods, all over its armored carapace, used to control it. They were inflamed. Something drove this creature to rage. But what?

“Hello Gene-Engineer Penrose.” The voice was familiar and despised. I turned around and in the early morning light I could see his well-dressed and diplomat’s outfit with a tiny remote in his hand. He also had two burly Junantra guards, genetically modified supermen at his beck and call.

“Ambassador Cohen.” I spat blood out of my mouth. “So all that interest in my work a year ago was not as harmless as I thought.”

“You wound me, Penrose. You should be happy I took an interest in your work and had such avid supporters amongst the populace.”

“So you could make this poor thing?”

“That poor thing has killed sixteen roachsters, all six of the hunter-killers left in the city, and two dozen other assorted vehicles. It was one of the finest killing machines ever made, even on this world. And it’s mine.”

“I know. It’s worth millions.”

“Billions, my good man. We made them in breed-capable pairs.”

“You are the final link in the chain aren’t you. You made the off-world connections.”

“Yes, and once we collect our genetic material from this one, for breeding, we will be on our way. So sorry about your car.” One of the Junantra guards walked over to the creature’s mouth and began extracting vital genetic chambers that could be used to breed the creature. The ambassador and the other guard walked over to me and helped me to my feet.

“And what about me.”

“That depends on you. The Human Race is still out there conquering the Universe and needs minds like yours to help it. I know you are a pacifist like all of your people here, but think of the potential value you could bring to our kind with your organic war machines.”

“I know. I would be paid handsomely to destroy life all over the galaxy for fun and profit. No thanks.” My blood was flowing down my leg, off of my arm and head.

“I am afraid I cannot allow you to leave knowing what you do.”

“I am afraid I am not asking to leave.” With blood on my hands, I reached out and slashed both the ambassador and the Junantra on the neck with my razor sharp nails. Working with gene-constructs, you occasionally have to have the ability to defend yourself. I had been weaponized during the time I was in the healing chambers. Such work was not common knowledge. It was necessary to save my life. Living here, being stronger and faster is a survival technique. On Earth, I would have been superhuman, here, I was just a faster, more agile snack.

Since being infected with spasm-fly venom, my survival altered my body as the potent virus has remained part of me. Living as an SP-V, I lived a life suffused in constant agony as my nervous system is antagonized by the virus, but I can control the spasms and constrictions with the help of the anti-viral gene mods inside my body.

The ambassador and his guard were not so fortunate. It tool only a few seconds for them to double over in pain and for their muscles to begin to pull back on their bones until they start to snap. An agony so great, they were rendered speechless as their vocal cords tore themselves in their throats. Every beat of their hearts, passed the weaponized virus into every cell of their bodies. Only being in a medical facility allowed me to survive the spasm-fly virus. Without immediate medical attention, their bodies will be turned inside out in a matter of minutes and I realized I left my comm badge with my car; in my dying car.

The Junantra died first, his superhuman strength is no asset here. His grunts are terrible, but brief. The ambassador dies only minutes later. The second guard hearing something, rushed to their aid, and with a quick slash he died a few minutes later.

I went over to Ona and saw she is already dead; my beautiful Ona, my first best friend. I will make you again, my dear. You have been far better to me than most humans I know.

I sat down with her and watched the sunrise. Looking over at the ambassador, I felt no regrets. Since he was the last of them, it should make it easy to clean up and ensure creatures like this one are never made again. With any luck, the Council will be able to investigate fully and hunt down the other one and see that it’s destroyed.

I came here to Cyridia to get away from the violence of the Empire. Here, everything is trying to live, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. I can live with that. That’s nature. But to kill each other for money. That’s an obscenity any way you look at it.

Just because I live on a planet full of peaceful people does not make me a pacifist.

Twilight Cont.banner

Pax Cyridian  © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Artwork: Flesh Raiders © Elderscroller/Markus of Austria; an artist on DeviantART

Hayward’s Reach

Posted by Ebonstorm on November 27, 2012
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

a tale of the twilight continuum Θ

From the ansible memoirs of Exalted Scout, Glendale Mokoto, Hero of the Exodus Wars and the Fall of Earth. These are an amalgam of the earliest recordings before he was presumed lost.

Two hundred years ago, I was nothing special. I had no extraordinary abilities or talents. I was not blessed with superhuman strength like members of the New Order, genetically manipulated to be the perfect human specimens, trained and bred to be the ultimate warrior protectors of the human race.

I did not augment my mind with sentient mechanical intelligence like the Cognoseti, who became human predictors of the future of man. It was their wisdom that discovered the Earth’s greatest hidden secret; that we were not the first creatures on Earth to evolve into sentience. These human machine hybrids would later house the first true machine-descended intelligences in human history.

I did not mingle my DNA with those of animal species to garner advantages lost by the development of our bigger brains. The Transformed, whose malleable DNA allowed them to absorb genetic traits of other species would lead Humanity in the exploration of new worlds after we lost our home in the Sol System.

You see, I was just a baseline human, good genes, nice teeth, good skin, and until it fell out in my fiftieth year, a nice head of hair. Two hundred years ago, I was also the most celebrated hero; indeed, I was the last hero of the Exodus of Man. They named a starship after me, they named a continent after me, they named thousands of children after me. And to me that was a strange thing, seeing how I did not actually survive the experience.

To ponder this, and to explain why you are now able to know any of this, you have to know a bit more about Old Earth.

I remembered the stink of the war. It got up into your nose and never left. You could smell the burning flesh, the expended rounds, the fear, exhilaration, the blood-lust, the sheer terror of the Henrenki boiling up out of the ground in every major city on the planet.

I remembered the fighting, the endless fighting, the bravery of our young ones, their ceaseless dying, wheat before the scythe. When we retreated, the Henrenkai came, wave after wave, like the ocean filling in the beach of our dead.

I remembered them as they swarmed over our positions with machine guns blazing; our bullets tearing into their nacreous, resilient flesh but they kept coming.

Things looked hopeless until the New Men appeared, with their mysterious talk about the Art of War, talk of the brush strokes of their weapons, their mastery of their mysterious battle-trance. In those days, all we knew of war was the spastic struggling of the uninitiated to battle. We had been too long at peace.

Our struggles for survival, even before He came all but absorbed our attention. But even after generations of peace, we were still a warlike species and returned reluctantly to the field of battle. Every man woman and child was armed because this was a war without quarter and without mercy.

When the Cognoseti revealed His existence, He rose from the oceans, the Ancient Enemy of all who live in our galaxy. We did not know He was legendary. We did not know what scars He and His kind had swept across the face of that, as yet unknown to us, galactic empire. We did not know what He wanted, only that He destroyed all that we had, with malice and forethought. We did learn one thing: when He rose from the Pacific Ocean, we realized the nature of our enemy, He had the might of an entire world, buried within our own.

Mechanically-sentient, He created weapons like the Henrenkai from His very flesh, the organo-mechanical body in which He fell to Earth billions of years ago and hid in the iron core of our planet. He hid because He was pursued by the greatest species our galaxy had ever spawned. He hid and waited until they passed away or forgot; we are not sure which. When He arose again, He had been all but forgotten by everyone in the galaxy. How could they not; nearly three billion of our years had passed while he slumbered.

So we were forced to fight Him on our own, tiny simians against a god-like machine who had tried to enslave an entire galaxy. He fought us on land, sea, air, and even in space. What could we do against an enemy so incredibly powerful? He destroyed a third of the human race and had barely awakened. We lost all hope.

Then we received a signal from space. It appeared on every communication band, every wavelength, every technology, all at once. If you were watching anything, listening to anything, it appeared and told you to be ready.

A prophecy had sent them back to us. They told us it was time to leave our world. They told us to gather as much of our world as we could carry. We did not understand, but we gathered our resources, every animal, every plant, every insect we thought we could find and catalog. We even set aside entire islands, marked with force fields to make them stand out.

We had no idea of what the Sjurani were capable of back then. We did not know what to expect, but their message gave us hope, so we fought on.

I remember the first time I saw their ships. They blotted out the sun. We fought a retreating battle to their designated pick up points. They gathered us up with tractor beams, entire cities, whole islands. It was rumored they took the entire African continent. Something about it being a template for our entire world’s DNA.

They landed in their reptilian regalia and fought alongside us, as terrifying as the Henranki in their own way. Garishly colored in silks and metal, reptilian, festooned with gem-encrusted scales, loud, large, and boisterous; think of Old Earth fraternity boys armed with plasma cannons and rocket launchers and you will know something of the Rex, a warrior-breed of the Sjurani.

They helped us hold the line against the Ancient Enemy while we fled. They claimed they were the descendants of dinosaurs who had been born on Earth hundreds of millions of years in the past. We were too desperate to care. And too foolish to realize why that was more important than we knew at the time.

The evacuation took two weeks. My battle-brothers, old and new, human and Sjurani, fought until the very last ships were leaving the planet. Hundreds of millions were moved to ships every day, each scarred with the loss of someone or something precious.

The Sjurani told us He was soon to fully waken. Once that happened, we would stand no chance at all. The Ancient Enemy had only one agenda, and that was leaving the Earth. We could never allow that. Our planet’s gravity well was the only thing that prevented Him from opening a gateway to another universe – a universe full of creatures as powerful as he was.

But we could take the fight to Him: A suicide mission.

He had raised an island in the Pacific, a place from whence all of his forces rose to the surface. We would fight him there.

We infiltrated the Ancient Enemy with the help of Sjurani technology. We carried into Him an antimatter weapon, created by the Sjurani, with the force of a billion Hiroshima bombs. A weapon far more powerful than anything Humanity could ever create. His arrogance in being shielded from outside, made him believe he was invulnerable. Once inside His armored shell, we could use short range teleportation to penetrate deep into His neural network. Three groups entered the alien machine. Even if all three were successful, they told us our weapons would not kill Him. But we could wound Him, perhaps even lobotomize Him, for a time.

This would allow the two hundred million humans who agreed to stay behind to cover the final retreat. The West Coast of North America was destroyed in this final battle. The Rocky Mountains were all that remain of that coastline. One billion humans left the Earth in that two week period with some of the most terrifying fighting ever seen in any war, any conflict.

Once the antimatter was placed, I, the last survivor of three dozen of the finest warriors of two races, made my way to the surface killing everything in my path. I waited. The never-ending supply of Henrenkai continued to boil forth from the Ancient enemy. In that last moment before detonation, I lay down my exhausted weapon and the Henrenkai stopped, confused by the act.

With seconds remaining, I assumed the battle occurring in space had interrupted my teleport and I resolved myself to dying, free of anger and the corruption of war. I vowed never to wage war again. My death would keep my promise.

I opened my arms and the battle-enraged Henrenkai charged me, their razor sharp talons poised to shred flesh from bones. In those final seconds, time slowed as I watched them. Close to me, I studied them in a way I had never before. Their anatomy was a marvel: Bones of carbon fullerenes, talons sharper than the sharpest steel. Wide, predator-set eyes, excellent for determining the distance to me, their prey. I could smell their hot breath, a bitter almond overtone, and I closed my eyes, ready for death. No fighting, no resistance. I felt the antimatter as it detonated. A shockwave swept through me. I could feel it in my very atoms.

Suddenly, I could see the blast wave of energy and could feel my atoms snatched away protectively within the teleport sheath. I felt my body dying as the waves of antimatter, converted to gamma rays and cosmic radiation, were transformed into the most powerful kind of destruction in our universe, in the perfect release, the ultimate annihilation of matter. No man can ever say he sat in the heart of a star and lived to tell others of it. Neither could I. It would have been breathtaking if I had a breath to take.

In that eternal second, I violated causality and was in two places at one time. I was trapped in the containment field, experiencing a quantum reality, existing in two places and in neither. I was onboard the ship in a viewing chamber teleported, so they thought, to allow me, with the remnants of my species, to see the death of my world. Such a weapon would destroy the Earth as we knew it. I watched, both detached at a distance and intimately aware of the death throes of my home planet.

For a moment, I could be anywhere and any when; I moved through time and space. I saw the Ancient Enemy’s arrival on Earth three billion years ago, fleeing, from the Precursors. He crashed into a small planet in an unidentified star system with a small yellow star. I could feel His terror, I could feel His near dissolution, His flesh, burned with a fire like a solar flare, tearing His substance apart. He submerged Himself into our planet and the rocky surface extinguished those flames and His terror subsided. He sank into our world, and His screams grew quieter, until after an eon, He slept and forgot.

As I stood there in the middle of the greatest energy release since His arrival, I realized He would not die. He would survive just as He did before. Our work was almost in vain. His massive, nearly indestructible bulk would provide one benefit. Those who remained behind would not be wiped out from the weapon. They would be stranded on a world still trying to kill them. The thought was terrible and the last thing I remembered.

I was the last human to leave the Earth two hundred years ago, an unwitting and unwilling hero of a war we all but lost.

I woke several years later on our way to Toranor, a system of Gaian super-worlds created by a race of highly-advanced beings called The Precursors. No other race in the galaxy has ever come close to their level of technological capability. They were as far beyond even our Sjurani benefactors as we were beyond ants.

The Toranor star system had trillions of sentients living in harmony in what was called the jewel of the Corvan Empire. Now homeless, Humanity and the Sjurani were offered a place on one of their lesser worlds. I knew I would never call this place home. I had seen too much, done too much. There would be nothing for me here.

All that I valued died with Earth.

I asked what a single man could do in an Empire of sentients with magnificent technologies, making our human achievements, even in the year of our Lord 2475, seem like children’s toys? How could I distinguish myself?

By providing the one thing all Empires need: New boundaries. I became a Scout. I was told the role of a Scout was a solitary one. I would be provided a robot companion if I desired. My job would be to map stars toward the center of the galaxy for planets capable of being terraformed by the Mariovel at some point in the future. I was promised the knowledge of the Empire at my fingertips and all the time of my life to read and learn it.

It was then the Sjurani revealed to me that I had died during the teleportation. They had never tried to teleport during an antimatter explosion. No one ever had. My mind was able to be reconstructed, but my body had died. They took my mind and placed it within a robotic shell that mimicked my own form so well that I was never aware of the change at any time.

I was angered at first. I walked around for almost a year, on Galtan II, our new home, knowing something was different, but not knowing what. Galtan II was like all of the worlds of Toranor, beautiful, diverse, fantastic. The knowledge that all of these worlds were created by a sentient species that was not God, boggled the imagination. Imagine a star system with twenty habitable worlds. The knowledge would turn our ideas of science and religion on their ears.

Galtan II boasted a forest that spanned the entire equatorial band of the planet, one giant forest whose myriad trees were connected by their root system into one organic supercomputer, a single hive mind which could separate segments of itself to communicate with other forms of life. One of the most amazing world-minds in this part of the empire. Yes, there were others. Since the Botani did not choose to live in the colder parts of the planet, we were offered the other two thirds of the world to live responsibly on. With the technology of the Sjurani supporting our own, we could be good neighbors.

The Sjurani told me that what they did, they did for love of my heroic sacrifice. They created an entire technology around saving my life. I learned later they held my psychic resonance in an energy field that consumed the energy of a world for years. I felt guilty once I learned what was done on my behalf.

I learned that my condition, once successful, because of my heroic stature, spurred a whole division of baseline humans to make the transition to the robotic. We were called The Transcended. They gave up their flesh to become the first robotic-human hybrids. Were there consequences? Certainly, but none of them ever considered it an unfair trade, except perhaps for me. I would have liked to have had the choice.

When I was appointed a Scout, the Corvan empire made a starship for me; since I was no longer a living organic, they made something faster than had ever been created before. I named it Hayward’s Reach after a small seaside town where I lived the quiet life of a writer before the end of the world came for us all. Before activating the ship, the greatest generals, admirals and Sjurani Rex came to see me off. They said wonderful things, heroic things about me and my sacrifices. I didn’t listen.

All I could hear was the loneliness. No, the alone-ness that space offered me. I thanked them. I climbed aboard my ship and synchronized my ansible to an ansible station here on Galtan II which would relay my reports. Since an ansible could only be paired once, something about quantum entanglement, it was the most critical thing I could do unless I wanted to communicate relativistically.

My pilot was a Cogneseti, a sentient intelligence housed in the mechanical body of a woman. She was the first of her kind, a mechanical version of myself. I started life as a man and became a machine. She started her existence as a machine and became a woman.

Her name was Pele. She named herself after the mythical goddess of the legendary Hawaiian Islands that are no more. When I asked her about her name, she said once she had studied human history. The tale of the Hawaiians fascinated her and she had taken it upon herself to study all of the notes on Earth’s Polynesian cultures. Our ship was equipped with a distillation of all of the knowledge of the human race. We would also have an upstream of new ideas and achievements when time and bandwidth permitted. When I asked her why she was coming with me, she said since she would never get to see Hawaii, the next best thing was to discover a place like it somewhere else.

She arranged our path through the empire and indicated we would reach the edge of the Empire in as little as three jumps and three months using their Gate system. After that, we would be on our own, moving at approximately thirty-two times the speed of light. It would take us three thousand years to cross the galaxy. We would be taking the scenic route, flying through as many star-dense systems as possible. We were the fastest things in the Empire, streaking away from all that I knew, and I was glad to be doing it. It was unlikely we would survive the journey across the galaxy. The Sjurani estimated we might live for four hundred years with careful maintenance. We promised to change our oil regularly. Pele laughed. The Sjurani just looked quizzically at me.

Sitting down, I called up a data-screen. The words were queued up from earlier in the day, waiting for me. Pele was sitting at the nav station monitoring the ebb and flow of the aether. I read out loud as would become a tradition for the two of us in the decades to come: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

I had always wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities, and at that moment, it seemed appropriate. I never had the time before. Taking my companion’s hand, this new season of light illuminated our souls as we fled into the core of the galaxy, to see things no man had seen before. I, once being the most ordinary of men, had transcended the human experience for something never done before. It was, indeed, the best of times.

Hayward’s Reach © Thaddeus Howze, 2011, All Rights Reserved

The Hub World is copyrighted by Ville Kröger  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Some Rights Reserved.

Through the Gate is a concept project by Andrey Lifanov © 2006 . All Rights Reserved.

Insurrection: Biyu’s Story

Posted by Ebonstorm on November 18, 2012
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Insurrection. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

a tale of the twilight continuum Θ

“They are all asleep,” Biyu said to Chuntra.

Biyu was finished strapping Master Wex down and checking for his vitals from the medical chair. He was well within the parameters for his species and was resting comfortably. His armored quills were growing in quickly replacing those lost during today’s challenges. His natural regenerative capabilities were bolstered by an amino acid drip which fed his need to replenish the proteins lost rebuilding his body. He was also the least injured of the three males on the ship. “We have five days until we reach the Trinary Expanse. I hope to be able to pick up a clue once we arrive in system.”

Chuntra stood with the support dome of her Corvan Regular armored suit open and water pooling around the neck. Her three eyes were above the water level focused intently on the three very different soldiers breathing with labored but quiet breaths. She noticed the smooth but alien shapes of the ship and realized that she was not in a human designed ship. She touched a variety of surfaces and noted exotic materials. “This ship was made by the Bel-ha, wasn’t it? How did a human end up with a ship created by an Old Galactic Race?”

Travelling Light, a starship of Bel-ha design moved through subspace by folding the distances between the destination and their previous location. The ship was fairly unique as was most Bel-ha designs in that it was customized and created to specification. The designer of the ship was Silver Death-Singer, a Sjurani Prince, ninety years ago, commissioned as a deep insertion vehicle.

The Bel-ha had commercial ship facilities where they created their standard warships and commercial starships. Travelling Light was not one of them. She was created with a particular need in mind and as such had capabilities other ships her size simply did not have. She was created as a gunship, her firepower, disproportionate to her size. She was also created to be a stealth ship, undetectable except by the most sophisticated of electronic warfare vessels. She was designed to operate deep in enemy territory, drawing energy and fuel from the stars. She had limited self-repair capacity to continue operating behind enemy lines with limited resources.

She was designed as an intelligent starship, complete with a neural network, capable of learning, adapting and even flying herself. In her own way, she was a living starship, capable of learning as well as any sentient organism. She came into the possession of Thomas Wilks over three decades ago and has worked as his primary support ship during his time as a covert operative and later as a Resurrection Soldier.

“This ship and I came into the Major’s employ nearly thirty years ago,” Biyu began. “A newly minted Resurrection Soldier, one of the last of his generation and unbeknownst to us at the time, the last to be made, was brought online thirty years ago. He was code-named “Majoris” after the starship Majoris Selkar that brought Pan-humanity to Harata II, all those years ago. He chose his call-sign in tribute to that great ship, which was later lost in the battles against the Nox during the years of the First Galactic Wars.”

Biyu came around to the Major and extended cables from her fingertips which sought out access ports on his body. As she plugged into his body, she became aware of several diagnostic displays in her visual field. The diagnostics indicated his biomechanical systems were functioning within the expected parameters but there were signs of degradation due to his recent traumas. His nano-machine count was down and would continue to degrade as long as he had no contact with his Frame. She also noted without his image, she would have to maintain certain support algorithms which kept his body functioning at peak efficiency. As long as he did not strain himself, he would be fine.

She sat down and looked over at Chuntra. “Come and sit with me, Ambassador and I will tell you how Thomas and I first met. I will have something synthesized that you will be able to enjoy while we talk away the hours. The boys won’t be getting up for quite some time.”

“Ship, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Ambassador,” the ship began, “we have a limited menu of Corvan delicacies but I am certain we can find something you like.”

“Thank you, Ship. I will trust your judgment.”

The ship slid the medical chairs of the injured crew members back along the wall and created a depression on the floor. The floor began to glow and soon water began to float in the air between the floor and the ceiling. The water continued to fill the area until it was a ball approximately 3 meters in diameter.

“Do you have a preference for salt water or fresh water. We have seventeen different water worlds on record, if you have a particular preference, we can configure the water with the salt and chemical makeup of whatever world you choose from our database. If you know the chemical configuration of a particular world, we can provide that as well,” the ship announced.

Chuntra stopped for a moment to consider. “To be honest, I have never been to Corva Prime, the world of my people. Is that in your database?”

“Of course, this vessel has carried over sixty Corvan delegations in its time. Please stand by, it will only take a moment. I have taken the liberty of heating the water gently past your internal body temperature. There will also be food made available shortly. I will take your suit in the back and begin making modifications, so that it is more comfortable and still as useful as it can be.”

“Thank you, Ship.” Chuntra slid out of her suit and reached into the bubble of water. She pulled herself up into the bubble and enjoyed the freedom of movement. She extended her tentacles and noted the field extended as well. “I’m much more comfortable now, Biyu. I guess it storytime.”

Biyu’s Story

I met the Major, two hundred years after humanity arrived in the Twenty Moons region of Toranor. I had recently decided to leave the employ of Danarius Flen Hall, callsign, Coda, a Resurrection Soldier or Revenant of some skill and renown but very questionable morals. He had been employed in a variety of insertion missions during the first Galactic War and his tactics and problem solving capabilities left much to be desired. He was well regarded in the Triune Council and Corvan Military as an effective operative. His last mission required he infiltrate a splinter colony of humans who were engaged in rogue genetic engineering experiments.

Those experiments used a variety of alien species and were attempting to reverse-engineer genetic patents used to modify certain species to live in specialized environments. These exclusive environments were bonded at the genetic level and if you lacked the proper gene structures, you could not enter, or as we found out later, leave without disastrous results. They were using these gene-patents to create a slave ring of aliens who could be forced to work in gene-engineered environments and would be unable to leave.

Coda and I infiltrated the core facility with the orders to capture and return the scientists to the Triune Council. Coda decided to destroy the facility and all the unfortunate creatures living within it. There were tens of thousands of innocents trapped within the facility. I was unaware of his true intentions and by the time I realized what he had planned, there was nothing I could do to stop it. The Imperium considered it good work, but I believed there was more to the operation than he did, but he was unwilling to follow up and the case was closed.

I decided after five years of working with Coda, I was done. He and I had two dozen or so missions together but I never felt close to him despite the nature of the psychographic manipulations required to keep him sane. I sometimes wondered if he needed more therapy than I could give him. We parted ways and I did not see him again for a number of years. When I next saw him, he was working on Harata II, as a research specialist, dealing with advance genome manipulations. I heard through the Vine he was specifically assigned to investigate, infiltrate and destroy any genetic aberrations found in the Imperium.

I had been working as a Pilot for almost forty years at that point and considered leaving the line of work. I had plenty of money and could have retired. Many Pilots died early in their careers because their Soldiers do not take their relative fragility into consideration when they are working on operations. I recommended a different training regimen to the Magistrorum, with more emphasis on combat operations and training, in addition to our technical duties. It was considered to be a burden but after two years arguing, I became a trainer at the Magistrorum and trained other Conscientia in both their technical duties and their basic military duties. That is where I met Thomas. He was assigned to the facility as a new assigned Revenant, and he would be teaching with me, helping the new Pilots to understand their strengths and limitations in the field and how they could best help the Revenant they were assigned to.

This ushered in a new training program that increased the survivability of new Pilots. We worked together in this fashion for five years before we were called on to rescue a Sjurani starship downed on a Breeder world. The first Breeder Wars were dirty and violent and the Breeders attacked many early outposts and took over those worlds in the early stages of transformation and habitation. The Sjurani were sent to investigate a Subaki colony that had been overrun with Ebuntun, an insect-like breeder which had destroyed the base colony, and were spreading to other facilities on the planet. A group of Sjurani strike cruisers had been assigned to intercept and stop the Ebuntun and save the colony. Something had gone wrong and the Sjurani were requesting a Revenant team to investigate and recover any of their lost operatives. They were also expected to complete the original mission of the Sjurani and destroy the Ebuntun and save the colonists.

Unfortunately, there were only five Revenants available, including Thomas, and it was deemed that the they, two squads of heavy regulars and two dozen light mechs would be assigned to the planet. Thomas had never been assigned a Pilot since he came directly from his Bonding to the Magistrorum, so I agreed to be his Pilot, even though I had promised myself, I would never again work in the field. I must admit to being intrigued by him, he was very much a model soldier, even though he had seen combat from a variety of fields, he still retained a very human, very well-centered carriage.

Thomas and I were assigned a small squad of light mechs, who would provide support for the five other Revenants who would be leading the primary assault. We would offer fast attack services only when necessary to help hold a line. The mechs were equipped with jump packs, I used a glider-wing and Thomas’s Frame has an anti-gravity thrust array, so we were able to arrive on the scene with minutes of being called. I am happy to say, that the early days of that campaign did not see very much combat and I got to spend time with Thomas as we drilled the mecha pilots on tactics and operations. The Ebuntun retreated, at first, from the one thousand Corvan Regulars, the two hundred Pan-human Mechanized Assault group and the five Resurrection Soldiers who were assigned to this task force. There were several Eagles, providing air support and our light mecha squadron of twenty-four heavy mechs. Their retreat was short-lived.

One evening, a month into the campaign we received a call from a Corvan Regular group that was approaching a downed Sjurani vessel. The ship was surrounded by the Ebuntun and they were using a heavy weapon unfamiliar to the Corvan Regulars. The shield arrays on the Sjurani vessel were working but it was estimated they would have only six hours before their shields failed. The Force Commander requested heavy mech support along with the Mechanized Assault tanks because the initial stealth foray using two Revenants did not go well. The Revenants did not die, but were gravely injured and temporarily removed from the battlefield.

It was decided, with a heavy barrage of tank fire as well as a lightning strike of heavy mechs, we could take down the remaining five projector towers. One tower had be destroyed by the earlier team. Each tower was in line of sight of the others, as the Sjurani ship was half buried after its crash. As we suited up we were given a special directive by the Fleet Commander, whose order superseded any other authority on the planet.

We were to rescue that flagship and see that the crew and any survivors are to be evacuated to the Fleet Command ship. We indicated that we understood and would gather all survivors. The heavy assault was a success. Between the tank fire and the heavy mechs we were able to destroy the projector towers. We did try and capture the technology intact, but it simply cost us too many men. The weapon was unlike anything we had ever seen. Once the beam struck an unshielded target, the target simply stopped moving as if frozen, ice formed on the shell and within minutes, the target crumpled to dust. It was as if, all of the energy from the target had been stolen away, down to atomic structure. We could no longer risk losing men and destroyed the weapons.

Once we turned the Ebuntun away, we surrounded the ship and got inside. The ship was already infested with the Ebuntun and they were trying to take key sections of the ship but the Sjurani had managed to hold those areas, including the engineering area where the shield management had taken place. Approximately one third of the crew was dead or injured, the rest were intact and defended their ship admirably.

Then, all at once, things went to hell.

The soldiers outside had set up picket stations, which included tanks and their support teams, pulse turrets, mortars and mecha beam platforms. The Ebuntun had returned but this time, there were thousands more than earlier. Whatever they wanted, they intended to get. We killed them by the score. We used our beam lasers until the focusing crystals shattered and overheated. We shot pulse rifles until we ran out of ammunition, dropped multiple warhead mortars and they still kept coming. We eventually were forced to go to hand to hand and everyone pitched in. The battle lasted hours.

When we found the Sjurani prince, he was talking to a group of younger Sjurani who were wearing the finest battle-armors and weapons money could buy. They were surrounded by a group of older, very scarred, very frightening looking Sjurani with a variety of ancient ceramic weapons with mono-molecular edges. They glistened with the unstable monomolecular matter used to cleave apart any matter this weapon touched.

We indicated that Thomas and I were the Prince’s escorts. His name was Silver Death-Singer and these were his clutch, they were on their first mission and eager for combat. We let him know we had an avenue set up for escape and our troopers were keeping it secure. We moved through the ship and as we exited we realized our lines were not holding. The Force Commander had initiated several planetary bombardments to push the Ebuntun back, and had begun dropping weapons and ammo onto the scene. The heavy mechs were supporting the Corvan Regulars and tanks and were barely keeping the enemy at bay. The flanks were collapsing so we needed to get the prince out of there. There was a heavy tank transport ready a thousand meters from the ship and we were meeting only minimal resistance until a heavy contingent of the Ebuntun erupted from the ground beneath us.

Thomas was confronted with a creature of immense size and speed and it grabbed him with its heavy front pincers. The rest of us were swarmed by smaller creatures about the size of a fist. The grabbed on to us and overwhelmed us with their armored weight. The older Sjurani and the heavy mech soldiers, used flamethrowers to clear the creatures but they just kept up their assault. Heavier creatures kept Thomas busy and it took every round I could fire to keep him from being overwhelmed. Within fifteen meters of the personnel tank two of the Prince’s brood were picked off and dragged away underground. Thomas followed and was gone for several minutes. We had our hands busy just covering that last bit of ground. As we got to the tank we were surrounded and the Force Commander had called for a measured withdrawal. We got the prince into the tank along with his surviving son.

We were about to leave without Thomas when he came up out of the ground carrying the younger daughter, but the oldest son was not with him. He managed to fight his way to the ship, electro-blasters, and flechette darts cutting through the remaining Ebuntun and ran alongside the tank until we could safely stop. He explained to the Prince that his son was likely still alive, they seemed to be making an effort to not injury him, he simply could not reach him through the crush of bodies. The Prince seemed unhappy with this news but was pleased to have his daughter returned to him. When we reached our base, the Prince indicated he would be staying on the planet in an effort to find his son and would be interested in working with the Heavy Division and adding his own Heavy Troopers to the squad.

We worked this campaign for three years. We eventually drove the Ebuntun off the planet and returned it to the Subaki. The Subaki had been under the leadership of a Praetor Wex, who helped us several times during that campaign. We were appropriately rewarded but were never able to find the Prince’s son. For saving the Prince’s other children, Thomas and I were given the Sjurani Prince’s personal gunship, Travelling Light, a custom designed ship purchased from the Bel-ha homeworld. The Prince hired us to work for him on a variety of missions for the next sixteen years. We travelled the length and breadth of the Imperium working missions for the Sjurani on a number of their colony worlds, sometimes covertly, other time with the Pax Sjurani, a special peacekeeping force, on missions vital to Sjurani security. The prince retired after a particularly terrible mission. If he wants to tell it, I will let him.

The Major and I continued working together and did so until two years ago, when he was sent on a mission, but I was unavailable. I was working on a paper discussing the current Image erasure protocols. At the time, I was promoting research that indicated a potential for development for the AI Complexes that work with the Resurrection Frame AI and the neural network of the Soldier. The current process erased images as soon as they developed anything that resembled independence or began to register on the sentience scale. This was to prevent the occurrence of rogue AI. I protested this due to built-in safety protocols already designed into the software. I felt true intellectual development might create a tool or support device of far greater utility than the current dependent AI Complex.

My paper was heard, and subsequently ignored. No policy changes have taken place since my last dissertation, but since I have made several major changes to the policies of AI in the Triune Government and Ministries of Conscientia Sciences, I am confident I will be able to make change over time. I will use the behavior of the Major’s last image as a potential indicator of what free willed Complexes might be capable of.

“Biyu, do you have an actual military rank?” Chuntra had listened closely and intently and was trying to decide if she would ask her next questions. While she was swimming, the Ship introduced a variety of foods into her bubble. Each was authentic tasting and quite delicious. Some were even quite swift. She decided not to ask how the food was created or made ambulatory. She noted the colors of some of the fish appeared to be as true to the foods she had eaten on Lolikai’s Command Cruiser.

Biyu had sat down near the Major and extended several other tendrils which plugged into other ports across his body. “I do not have a military rank as such. In any operations with the military, however, I am treated as having an army rank of Captain.”

“I have worked with only a few dozen Humans, and I find them to be a strange species. Don’t they resent your manufactured nature? Most Humans I have worked with have had little love for any form of mechanized life.”

“Working with the military offers me a slightly different group of Humans to work with. Most military people accept the idea that machines make it possible for Humanity to compete in a Universe with a variety of creatures, stronger, faster, and in some cases, so much smarter than the members of Pan-humanity. In most cases, they may reluctantly accept my machine nature as a tool to give them opportunities they would otherwise not have access to.” Her voice seemed a bit distant as she stared at the Major.

“I have to admit to having very little experience with uh, um, what do you prefer to be called? Mechanical sentients? Artificial intelligence?”

“The term used technically is ‘mechanized sentience’ or ‘non-human sentience.’ When housed in an android or synthezoid body, we use the term ‘Conscientia’ from the Latin, a dead human language, from which many scientific ideas are standardized, for consciousness.”

“Thank you for talking with me about this. Does working with the Resurrection Corp have any other advantages for the Conscientia?” Chuntra was starting to warm to Biyu and was feeling less self-conscious.

“Being a Captain allows me to effectively work with most military officers without too much rancor. I have created a variety of weapons, armor and other medical technology since I have been assigned to the Corps so I do have a reputation for being a supporter of military troops. Most are happy to work with me once they find out who I am. I have created my own line of non-powered light ceramic armor using a new mesh construction making them lighter and tougher than the previous Corvan designs. I also created a heavy pulse pistol design favored by many of the Resurrection troopers, called Biyu’s Best.”

Biyu was checking the burns and scale damage of Essver. Several of the burns had penetrated both layers of his outer scales. Reaching up, she grabs a regenerator and it emits a purple radiation that begins to slowly repair the cellular damage. The primary benefit of the purple radiation was its ability to speed healing and prevent infection. Once his inner tissues were repaired, the purple ray would enhance the growth of his outer scales, which normally took some time to be replaced naturally.

“You seem to have some level of celebrity amongst the Soldiers. Fascinating.”

“I have been to over twenty campaigns and as many insertion operations. My military experience rivals most experienced military officers.” She paused for a second and made some adjustments to the Major’s sleep monitoring systems. “I am more often called Doctor, since I have three medical degrees and two scientific doctorates as well. My preferred title is Pilot, since that is the work, I value the most, because it gives me time with the man I value the most.”

“Biyu,” Chuntra had begun to turn darker colors, a Corvan indicator of embarrassment. “I understand you have more than some basic affection for the Major. He is a human and you are not. Does that factor into your relationship at all?”

She smiles, “To be honest, sometimes. He is very human sometimes and despite my appearance and full physical functionality, to him, our relationship is still something less than desirable. And to complicate matters, the AI within the Frame is also female in nature, and somewhat possessive. The poor man is surrounded by numerous women, but none of them are human, all are sentient, and all love him deeply. I think he resents it because despite our sentience, he feels less capable than any or all of us. He is dependent on machines to live, and dependent on all of us in one form or another. Ship to move him, house him, protect him from his enemies, dependent on me to fly the ship, maintain his health, his sanity and sometimes remind him of his humanity, and the Frame has the most difficult job of all, keeping him alive or returning him to life if he is killed. It is no wonder he wants very little to do with us sometimes. We control his entire existence.

“There was a woman on the planet.”

“We know. There were chemical traces on him when he returned to the ship. We don’t think about it much because he also seems to understand that being with Human women is always temporary with him. He travels too much and his life is far too dangerous for anyone who cannot protect themselves from this life.”

“What if he has feelings for this female?”

‘What of it? He is a human nearly a century in age. And if we do our jobs right, he could live as long as we could. Ship has a expected lifespan of six hundred years or more. The Frame is based on a technology with a lifespan in excess of one thousand years, and I will function baring being blown to bits or destroyed in a crash, at least four hundred years.”

Biyu turned toward the Corvan and looked at her. Chuntra noted her peculiarly colored irises, remembering she had never seen a human with purple eyes before now. “We worry about his humanity and what he will be like after two or three centuries. We do not worry about human females, because they keep him connected to his humanity in ways we, even with psychographic manipulations, virtual realities, and hard light holograms, cannot. We love him, but we do not own him. He has always returned to us.”

“Biyu? You keep saying us? Who is talking?”

“Sorry, sometimes the ship and I will share a consciousness when we are together. If it would be easier, she can manifest a hard light hologram instead.”

“Uh, no. I think I am okay with it this way. Is there anything else I should know about you?”

“Child, I am nearly a hundred years old as well. There is plenty for us to talk about during the next five days. And we will have at least a week or two before the Ship can be completely repaired. We have plenty of time to get to know each other. I understand you are young by Corvan norms. Your records indicate you are only about 35 standard years. Very young to be a diplomat.”

Chuntra began, “I came into the diplomatic Corps because my fathers were diplomats and I could not see myself, staying at home as a scientist on Shai, where I was born. Shai was near the other edge of the Empire and had numerous interactions with unaffiliated aliens. I was fascinated by them when my fathers would bring them home and discuss politics. I knew there was no other life for me and I studied hard from that point onward.”

Chuntra had begun to settle into the organic coral construction that was slowly being built in the corner of her floating habitat. The field was slowly being extended allowing more water to be added to the area, essentially filling the entire movable area of the command bay. The expanded water field was slowly being manipulated to include other organic matter constructed by nano-particles also suspended within the water.

“We can maintain this environment for you behind a hard light force wall on the bridge. I can also extrude a control interface within to allow you privacy and access to ships services. In case of emergency, the HL field will be maintained with the structural integrity fields. I can also make sure your suit is within the field, just in case.” The Ship’s voice resonated inside the water field but was perfectly modulated so that it barely tickled her cochlear chamber.

“Thank you, Ship, I appreciate all that you have done for me. Will I be able to stay near Master Wex?”

“The control globe being dropped will allow you to manipulate the field to be where you want it.” A slivered globe with control studs in a Corvan configuration, usable with the Corvan gripping arms floated into the watery bubble.

Chuntra played with the sphere for a moment and recognized the interface as a water environment manipulator, standard on Corvan battleships. She moved the field closer to Master Wex and floated over him. His face was contorted, as if in pain.

She reached out of the water sphere and touched him, smoothing water onto his facial quills. His face lost some of the tension and he seemed to ease into a more restful sleep. A few minutes later, she too fell into a silent repose.

Biyu smiled, recognized that touch and turned away to finish her diagnostics. “Goodnight, Chuntra. Sleep well.”

Insurrection: Biyu’s Story © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Citizen

Posted by Ebonstorm on October 9, 2012
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

a tale of the twilight continuum

This was the worst summer ever. Worst than the one where half the province caught fire. Worse than the one where we had a tornado everyday and entire towns disappeared overnight.

When the news was announced, my pa looked at me and shook his head. The lady who was reading the news used to be right pretty, but the drought going on five years now, had taken a toll on her and she was gaunt, skin tight, eyes dulled by a continued lack of clean water. “By federal mandate, a planetwide state of emergency is declared. All free standing bodies of fresh water, any unpolluted well, lake or reservoir is now the property of the Protectorate. It is illegal to own any source of water outside that which is regulated to your state and city provinces. This law shall remain in effect until further notice.”

“Oh, hell no.” Manard Strictland turned the television off. “How is a man supposed to run a respectable watering hole without water.”

My pa laughed. “Manard, when was the last time you served water to anyone here. We don’t come to your establishment for its water, unless its fire-water you offerin’.” He looked at me and while his mouth was smiling, his eyes were like flint, hard and sharp. “Boy, go ’round back and get the truck.”

“Yes, pa.” I went to the truck and saw the tarp in the back. My curiosity got the better of me. My Ma, bless her departed soul, once said a cat and his curiosity is a dangerous combination, but it’s just my nature. I drop the tarp, hot-foot it into the truck and tear around the corner and stop in the front of Manard’s bar.

“Okay, boys, I brought my entire collection and got a few from some other soldiers living near my farm.” He reached back and pulled the tarp off the pile of weapons. There were a bunch more fellas who has shown up while I was away. They were all veterans and had earned their Citizenship in the Barlantan Conflict. I hadn’t fought for our world against any of a dozen foreign invaders, yet but that was because I was just sixteen. I could join next year if Pa signed for me.

“So we are going to go to the water treatment facility and demand they turn the water back on?” Manard was looking a little green, as he looked over his rifle as if he were holding a poisonous snake.

“They don’t have the right to deny us water when we were told, our last conflict ensured water rights to all of our Citizens here at Elcas Grove.”

The Commonwealth government was a local protectorate. They had moved in during the fall of the Twenty Systems Empire and established themselves as a force for peace. At first. Then there were more skirmishes with other protectorates trying to expand into our space.

As foreign colonists we had limited rights, because we were not native to the planet, but we were offered Citizenship if we were willing to fight against enemies of the protectorate. It was the most important thing an immigrant could get. Parents could pass their Citizenship to their kids, if the kids had not earned their own. But the parent would have to emigrate back to their home planet. My father earned his Citizenship nearly thirty years ago during the early protectorate battles. Things had quieted down considerably since then.

In recent years, the government had begun to change, becoming more oppressive and violent in its dealings regarding mining and water rights. Skaris was a mineral-rich world and we helped make the protectorate far wealthier than they were when they got here. Pa was right, this was a water grab, pure and simple. If we didn’t stand up to them, they would come next and take back the land they gave us next.

Pa and his men had put on their old uniforms before heading out and before long we could see the water processing and storage facility. It was surrounded by members of the Protectorate guard.

“Frank, is that part of the Emhran Guard?” Pa and Frank were using a monocular to range and count the enemy.

“Yep. That’s them.” Frank was a former Emhran.

“Do you think they will fight?”

“Yep.”
“Is that gonna be a problem for you?”

“Nope. There are some orders you just shouldn’t follow. And they know it.”

“There are only thirty of us. There are three hundred of them, Pa.”

“They are stretched tight. Locking down all the planetary water supplies is tough to do with only a ten thousand men.”

My father taught me tactics as a child. I didn’t see how they could win.

He looked at me. “We can’t. That is why you will be waiting in the truck.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There are three million Citizens on Skaris. There are twenty thousand members of the Protectorate here. But Citizens won’t rise up, unless they believe the Protectorate is a crazed and repressive government. And they are, but people don’t want to believe it. Our deaths will rally the Citizens to throw off the parasites of the Protectorate. We are all old vets, we know the price.”

“What about me, Pa? I need you.”

“Since your Ma passed, who runs the farm now?”

I thought about it. “I do.”

“Who tends the animals and works with the townies?”

“I do, Pa.

“I don’t expect you to understand, son. I am an old man. But I know a corrupt government. Been running from one my whole life. The worst kind of corruption is the one that says it is doing what it does for your own good but it only benefits them. This is our home. You get those people to fight for their world, find a way to make them believe they can be free. We are at the edge of the galaxy, there is no place to go after Skaris. Now, go.”

“I ain’t running, Pa.”

“Listen, this ain’t about you. A Citizen fights for the rights of everyone not able to fight for themselves, son. What they are doing is wrong. Making it illegal for a man to enrich himself off the labors of others, even when there is enough to go around, is the basis for what we fought against as soldiers of the Commonwealth. Slavery was wrong then, this is wrong, now.”

“You are a Citizen now. Find a way to make it right.” He handed me his Empire-pulse rifle. It has encoded on it a genetic badge that marked him a Citizen. When he died, a genetic relative would bear the title.

Their skirmish was brief. Those old veterans knew their warfare. They killed all the Protectorate soldiers. I was with him when he died. We didn’t say much. I just held his hand. He passed quietly.

As I stood up and looked around, all I could see were the dead, scattered in undignified poses. I picked up my Pa’s rifle and walked away from the water facility. I could see protectorate vehicles in the distance.

I would be coming back, and next time I would have an army.

Citizen © Thaddeus Howze 2012, All Rights Reserved