by A. R. Knight
Clarity’s Dawn
A.R. Knight
Copyright © 2018 by Adam Knight
All rights reserved.
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-946554-26-0
ISBN (print): 978-1-946554-27-7
Published by Black Key Books
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.
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Also by A.R. Knight
The Mercenaries Trilogy
The Metal Man
Wild Nines
Dark Ice
One Shot
The Riven Trilogy
Riven
The Cycle
Spirit’s End
The Rakers Saga
Rakers
The Skyward Saga
The Spear
Oratus
Starshot
Mind’s Eye
Clarity’s Dawn
Creator’s End
Humanity Rising
The Last Cycle
Discover More Stories
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To Clyde and Emma
Contents
1. Home
2. Free Floating
3. A New World
4. Scrapper Station
5. From One Prison…
6. The Captors
7. Factions and Wars
8. Junkyard’s Rest
9. The Beast
10. Deals and Danger
11. Clarity’s Dawn
12. The Grove
13. A Walk With Anger
14. One Deal After Another
15. Playing the Game
16. Interrupted Negotiations
17. A Plan Begins
18. The Future Now
19. Captive Souls
20. Inciting Rebellion
21. Burning City
22. Scum Vs. Villainy
23. Fight And Flight
24. No Mercy
25. Home
An Excerpt from Creator’s End, The Skyward Saga Book Four
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Also by A.R. Knight
Discover More Stories
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1 Home
My home appears from nothing in the dark. A great brown and white circle hanging against an endless black expanse with bright lights twinkling, like holes in a leafy canopy. I stare at it through the front windshield of the shuttle, my mouth open. My eyes blink and see that my home is still there. When I left it, when I’d been taken from it, I thought I would never see its jungles, its oceans and mountains again. I thought my family, all that I knew, was lost forever.
Yet here it is again.
Are you happy?
Ignos, who I once thought was a god, what is now strange creature living inside of me, sends its words in the same way I might think them. Wisps of feeling, images and emotion passing through me. Am I happy?
Yes.
The shuttle will guide itself. Take in the view. Relax.
I don’t have much choice anyway. The bands locking around my feet and the netting clinging to my back, the things that kept me stable during the leap, do not retract. I’m stuck, as are my two friends, Viera and Malo, behind me. That might be a problem if we had anywhere to go, but right now we’re transfixed by what’s going on in front of us.
The brown circle is growing larger, closer. In between the drifts of white, which Ignos tells me are clouds, I see black specks cut across the view. Some larger than others, some appearing, like the birds of my home, to fly in formation.
Are they others? New Oratus, new creatures coming to take me away as soon as I land?
No. Those are my friends.
Ignos had mentioned, when I first found it in that crashed rock months ago, that its friends would follow. Its job was to prep Earth for them. These other gods would rescue us from hardship. Solve our problems and bring us to a new era of happiness and peace.
So why, why does this strange knot start to form in my stomach as I stare at the growing brown mass. As the specks define themselves into strange shapes. Some, like the planet, are circular. Others are jagged, made of lines and cutting edges as they zip around.
“Whatever those are, they’re coming closer,” Viera says.
She’s speaking about a set of three things off to our left. I can see them because, from the twin wings on their sides, bright red lights glow towards us.
“I can’t move,” Malo adds. “Can you, Kaishi? Can you free us?”
I ask Ignos the question, but the creature doesn’t respond. It’s staying silent now, and my unease grows. “I don’t know how.”
“Better hope these are friends, or we’re in trouble,” Viera says.
“Ignos says they are.”
“Forgive me if I don’t trust that thing,” Viera replies.
I watch as the three ships outside slide around us. To the point where, when the ships leave my view, I can still see the slight glow of those red points. The world in front of us has grown to fill the visible space. Parts of the brown shade differently. Large circles. Ripples in the earth, which I assume must be mountains. Others look like deep divots. Craters, perhaps.
What I don’t see are jungles. What I don’t see are oceans.
Are they on the other side?
Ignos doesn’t answer. The shuttle begins to shake, and suddenly the edges, then the entire windshield glows white and orange and red.
“What’s going on?” Malo says. “Is Ignos telling you anything?”
Everything will be fine.
Ignos’ words carry condescension, the same sort of kind dismissal that my parents used to give me when I was small child. An answer that says Ignos does not trust me with more.
As quickly as the fire picks up it recedes, and now icy particles begin to form. Strange crystalline formations grow on the glass. From hot to cold to melting again almost as soon as they form. All I see now is foggy gray white.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say.
“That makes three of us,” Viera replies.
In a past life, before, I would’ve prayed. Prayed to Ignos, the real god, not the creature, to deliver me from harm. And for the first time, for the first time since that strange night in the dark of the jungle when I saw the light of the ship that bore this creature to me, I pray. Pray to god I no longer think is inside me, one that I hope is around me. Is guiding me.
Malo hears my words and joins in. It’s a simple, common ritual. An ask for forgiveness, for courage, for guidance. For protection and love.
“Here’s hoping that works,” Viera says when we’re done; the Lunare doesn’t join us in the prayer but she’s happy to reap the benefits of it.
For a moment, it seems like we do. The gray breaks and beneath us I see something I can recognize; the tall spire, snow-tipped, of a mountain. Though this one, unlike the rocky gray against the green jungles of my home is almost all black. Around it, at its base and stretching for as far as I can see, there is no green. Only whites and grays and blues and reds. Only buildings. Arcing and toppling on top of one another, stacked and merging. Split by long cylindrical tubes that c
ircle and divide them like veins on a fern frond.
The knot in my stomach grows to full panic. Because I know now.
This is not my home.
The shuttle drops lower. We swoop along the mountain, and in the shimmering reflections of the tall buildings I can see that we are still being followed, tailed by the three craft that met us above the sky. But these are not the only things joining us in the air. Whereas my skies were filled with birds, these are full of objects of all sizes. They zip and dart everywhere, filling the blank spaces the same way fog or locusts might at home. I don’t understand how none of them hit each other, and Ignos replies with a single word:
Automatic.
I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what any of this is. I don’t understand what I see as I look inside the buildings that we pass, as I see strange devices, odd lights of pinks and yellows. Wide halls with groups of creatures I could never before imagine standing or moving. Talking or, in some cases, appearing to fire strange weapons like the kind the Oratus had on Cobalt.
Beneath us, the tubes seem to split everything, I see more shapes, several that look like Coorvin, the furry and big-eyed guide we’d left on the station. Called a Flaum, I think.
Below us, the travelers rocket by in small pods, sitting as they’re shot along to whatever end. Beneath them, on the surface, there are red-lined roads. Paved in stone. Red brick that appears molded without crease. Walking feet, claws, or stranger things cover the surface as hordes of creatures meander back and forth. It’s a sight that should fill me with wonder but instead twists me with dread.
“Where are we?” Malo says. “This isn’t home.”
No, it isn’t.
I ask Ignos if it lied to me.
I never did. I let you assume. If you went back home now, the Oratus would simply take you again. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let you fall into their hands.
What I do is my choice.
No. Not anymore.
The shuttle takes a sharp right turn, coasting us above a broader avenue and underneath a series of archways that glow red as we pass beneath them. The ones in front shimmer a pale yellow, the same that I’ve seen on insects warning you not to get too close. I realize these arches are guiding us down, towards a wide gaping hole that appears to lead into the ground.
“Don’t know what that thing inside your head is telling you, Kaishi,” Viera says. “But I’m not inclined to trust a word it’s saying. Wherever this is, it’s not home. Whatever these things are, I’m betting they’re not our friends.”
“We can’t do anything now,” I say. “Look and learn. Try to figure out what we can do.”
You can accept it. You can understand that your place in a larger galaxy is here. With us.
My place is with my people.
Kaishi, you have no people. All you have is me. All you have is what the Sevora will give you.
As I look forward, as we dive through the last of the arches and into an all-consuming dark beneath the ground, the only thing that breaks the my numbing shock is the cool wet of tears.
2 Free Floating
Time is a fluid concept. For Sax, at least, the definition of passing events is constantly in flux. Local time, measured by wherever he just happens to be. Galactic time, long ago shifting to measurements in cycles, grand events marking shifts in civilization’s power and goals. And, of course, his own biology. The rate of cellular decay and regeneration in his muscles and tendons and organs. This last is most apparent to him now, sitting cramped with Bas, his pair, and the old speckle-furred Flaum Coorvin in an evac mod hurtling through space.
“Do you know what it would mean for us to die out here?” Sax hisses all of a sudden.
He does this more to break the silence, one that’s been steadily growing in the eternity since they’ve launched from Cobalt. Since they’ve escaped from a space station hurtling towards its own ruin, whether by rogue asteroid or by internal power failures.
“I believe, in an environment such as this, were our bodies to fail we would drift, largely preserved, for a long while,” Coorvin muses, his large black eyes staring off at nothing. “I don’t believe there’s enough biological matter in here for us to decay properly.”
“Exactly,” Sax says, though that’s not at all what he meant, but it fits anyway. “We would lose our chance at honor. At victory. At solving the reason why.”
“Why?” Bas hisses a lighter, cleaner note than Sax.
Like most things between the two, Bas is better, more beautiful.
“Because we don’t know yet. We don’t know why that Amigga cared so much about the humans. I don’t know why fassoths were on the human’s planet or how the technology we saw there came to exist. Its relation to the primitive structures is all wrong.”
“An inquisitive Oratus?” Coorvin says. “I thought all of your kind were brutes. Bred for war and nothing else.”
“I was,” Sax says. He looks at his claws, the gray scales bleeding back from translucent pink and gray points. Four of them, one set on each arm, and two more talons on each of his thick legs, currently tucked in beneath him along with his tail. “I deserve to be in the midst of the enemy, tearing and shredding and slashing. Yet here I am sitting in this cramped prison waiting to die. Such a space makes you think. Makes you wonder.”
“Evva will tell us,” Bas says.
She’s serene, with her pink-gold scales, leaning back against the front bulkhead of the mod. This one has no windows, though there’s nothing to see. All they’re doing is hurtling through space. A single set of emergency beacons flaring, but who knows if anything is nearby, who knows if anything ever will be. They could crash into an asteroid, a planet, and not know it until it happened.
This does not bug Sax in the slightest: If he’s going to die an insulting death, he’d rather it be a surprise.
“Do you know that Dalachite thought the Oratus were the worst things in the galaxy?” Coorvin says of Cobalt’s now very-dead master, and now his white-tuft, black-furred face turned to look at them. “A failed experiment, it called you.”
“Experiment?” Bas opens her eyes, yellow with black vertical slits. “What did it mean by that?”
“I don’t know,” Coorvin says. “It never elaborated. I didn’t ask. Not my place, and not my interest.”
“Which is?” Now Bas is as eager to carry the conversation as Sax was to start it.
“To find the answer, of course. The key to peace in the galaxy. That’s the whole reason Cobalt was built. Why all of us signed up for the project.”
“All of us?”
“Most left before you came,” Coorvin said. “Took positions elsewhere as Dalachite changed its plans. As it became certain that the only way to survive was to eliminate everything else.”
“It failed.” Sax says.
“It came closer than you think,” Coorvin counters.
But before that Flaum can continue, a buzzing noise breaks out inside the mod; the communications array sparking to life. Moments later a wet voice pours out amid static. High-pitched and drenched, like a river rushing through words.
“Hailing the mod, hailing the mind. Looks like you’re going in the right direction. Care to tell us why? Seeing as we are here for Cobalt and Cobalt appears to be in a state of, can I say, disarray?”
The three of them meet each other’s eyes. Then Coorvin jumps to respond.
“This is Coorvin, we evacuated the station. Critical power failure. Requesting pickup.”
There’s a burst of static and then the voice comes back. “Power failure! Well that’s just downright bad. Guess we’ll have to be keeping these supplies then. Maybe a delivery, sell them. Who did you say is in that mod, just you Coorvin?”
“A couple of others,” Coorvin replies.
“We’re closing in on your location, would like to know a bit more about those others if you wouldn’t mind, Coorvin. You know how I dislike surprises.”
Coorvin released the small button on the t
ransponder. “Plake. She might kill us if I tell her what you are.”
“Why would she?” Bas says. “We haven’t done anything to her.”
“You’re Oratus. She’s Vyphen.”
That explains it. Sax rests his head back against the bulkhead. No Vyphen would willingly rescue an Oratus. It’s hard to have much sympathy for the species that drove your own to ruin. That removed its sole reason for existence.
But then, the Vyphen didn’t vanish. They discharged, streamed back into civilization, and found a new set of needs and wants. Did what other species had for cycles - found new desires that required certain means.
“She likes money, yes?” Sax hisses after a moment.
“She’s a runner. Of course.”
“Then tell her. Tell her we can pay her more than she’ll know what to do with. Bas and I are respected. High up in the Vincere. They’ll pay for our return.”
The evac mod shakes. Something’s docking with them. The transponder buzzes again.
“Coorvin, as you’ll be able to tell unless that Amigga’s stripped all your senses, we’ve docked with you. Going to open the door in a moment. Provided, of course, you tell me just why you’re being so secretive. And, while you’re at it, maybe explain to me why Cobalt decided to explode. Amigga generally don’t let power failures take out their stations.”
Coorvin looks at both Bas and Sax. The Oratus nod at the Flaum, who squeezes his eyes shut tight for a moment, then presses the transponder button.