~~~~~
Dastou, Nes, and Saan-Hu sat at a desk shaped like a chubby crescent moon, with the Saint on the inner curve near the back wall. They were in a small office in the world’s first embassy, the brand-new Blackbrick Diplomatic Center, an ocean away from Davranis Central where the story took place sixteen years ago. They were waiting to be called in for a meeting with the politicians that ran this place, and Dastou decided to finally reveal his origin to Nes, who’d been begging for the story to be told – and teased that it would be – for months now. That tale was supposed to be something along the lines of “Behold and be regaled! The account of a Saint’s ascendance as told by the man himself!”
Nes received a five-minute bedtime story. A boring one.
“You did this on purpose!” Nes accused.
Dastou laughed, then teased. “Yeah? Figured that out on your own?”
“You’ve been saying how you’re gonna tell me this or that for forever. And you tell me this stupid thing about you being found one day? Bullshit.”
“Can’t help it if it’s not exciting. It’s your fault for thinking it would be something grand.”
“You. Are. A. Saint. How can I not think it was going to be a big adventure or whatever, some kid finding his abilities in a life-risking series of crazy events? Plus, you kept being mysterious about it, making me pump it up inside my own head, all for this.”
Technically, Saints did the crazy stuff during training and mentoring, and forever afterward, but Nes knew much of that already. In addition, Nes was so upset at this lack of a story that he wasn’t asking how Lonoj and the others found Dastou in the first place – it certainly wasn’t random. It meant another story and another chance to mess with Nes, at least.
“Don’t harp on me, this gag was her idea,” Dastou revealed, indicating Saan with a nod.
“You...” Nes said while staring at her. “Oh, I hate you.”
Saan raised a blond eyebrow at him.
“Also,” continued Nes, “I’m pretty proud. Didn’t think you had practical jokes in you!”
Nes reached over his chair and hugged Saan forcefully, which she let him do since she was too well-trained to not see it coming and give him a black eye. In a second, she shrugged him off and shoved him away.
“Enough,” Saan grumbled.
Nes laughed for the both of them, but Saan was having a hard time keeping her typical straight face.
“You could have done so much more, though,” Nes told her. “You could have seeded hints with students, letting them say things near me. Or, let’s see....” He snapped his fingers. “Maybe had Dastou partially rewrite some kind of memoir from another Saint, with a clue about an incredible, death-defying origin. Left that where I would see. As happy as I am that you were the brains behind this, it could have been so much worse for me. We’ll get together, do something to someone else, teach you a few lessons in being a proper bastard.”
“Oh, good,” Saan said, likely regretting her choice of jokes.
Dastou tapped the wooden table for attention. “Alright, alright. We’ll talk about Saan’s descent into your mental territories later. How much time before we meet the Blackbrick Council?”
Saan checked her watch, a standard mechanical model with additional pastel green coloring on the hands. It was her favorite color.
“Hmph. Twenty minutes I was told,” Saan said, annoyed.
They were supposed to be in that meeting an hour ago and were delayed for unknown reasons. If Dastou knew that he and the skeleton crew he brought with him were going to be treated with such a lack of respect for their time he’d have ignored the request. The Saint couldn’t believe he had his head freshly shaved this morning only to be treated like a second-class guest. Hopefully the lucky placement of an overhead light combined with his reflective pate would give one of the politicians eye-strain or something.
“Okay,” Dastou said. “Let’s finish up here and wait them out.”
Nes sighed. “Fine, sure. What’s next?”
“Saan,” Dastou said, “you figured stats for the new grads yet?”
“Several minutes ago,” she answered. “I was reorganizing them for filing. It looks like several new records were set. Percentage of Ornadais Academy graduates was ninety-one percent. Percentage of field test volunteers was fifty-three. Percentage of Procurement Core volunteers was sixteen. Capita does not matter as the continual increase in our student body means we will set records for the next three years at least, until the school is at capacity. It was an excellent year, sir.”
Dastou nodded with satisfaction. “It’s almost too good to be true. I can’t believe how smooth things are going for us.”
Dastou was the headmaster and creator of the aforementioned Ornadais Academy, a military school of sorts that was now five years old. As the only independent, non-hypnotically controlled school of its size in the modernized world, it was, to say the least, a rough go at first. He had no idea what he was doing, but his staff – all of them members of the Sainthood in good standing that volunteered to join his cause – made the effort worthwhile. The school grew very quickly thanks to recruiters working so hard to find good people and continual improvements to the lesson plans meant every graduating class was as fearsome as the last, maybe more.
Thank the void for that initial growth spurt, Dastou thought. He was the last Saint, and therefore needed to pass his abilities around to his chosen students in order to make sure his ideals, his goals, were in place for the future. This world needed to be changed forever, and he was half-obsessed with making damned sure it would still happen if he was dead.
“Thanks, Saan,” Dastou said professionally, keeping how excited he was that things were going swell out of his voice. Mostly. “Any indicators for things to revise in the exams? I’m guessing our easterners had a few problems.”
Before Saan could answer, her mouth open with words on the tip of her tongue, she was interrupted by a voice coming from the intercom sitting on the crescent moon desk.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” asked a young man.
Saan tapped the blinking red answer button to open the channel. “We are here,” she responded.
“Oh, uh, I see. You were supposed to be in room twelve, not nine.”
“The carpet in all these rooms is ugly,” Dastou said loud enough for the intercom to catch. “I moved to the room with the least gross pattern and no windows so people wouldn’t interrupt us.” Dastou was almost always wary of how people saw him when he was in public. He didn’t feel like being hounded by either worship or denigration today, especially not through a closed window. “The embassy is empty, what’s the problem?”
“Yes, sir, the embassy was made to cancel all activity as per the agreement for your arrival. It was... one of the councilors that was upset about the room change.”
“We told someone about this when we changed rooms,” Dastou said, his words sharp, “so you should have known. What do you want?”
“My apologies, mister Saint, sir,” the young man stammered. “The Blackbrick Council are waiting for you. Please come to the Meeting Hall on the first floor. You should have it on the map we gave you.” The boy seemed nervous, unsure.
“So now we’re being waited on,” Dastou said to Nes and Saan, both of whom were as confused as he was by the lack of attention to detail on display by their hosts. The councilors, or whoever, were clearly trying to make themselves seem in control. Or that was the hope – better than truly being this incompetent.
“Fine, we’ll be there soon,” Dastou said, trying to finish up.
“One more matter, sir,” the young man said.
“Oh, by the... what else?”
“The crowd outside is, at this point, substantial. Over a hundred people.”
Dastou eyed Nes, who shrugged, then Saan who added a slow shake of her head.
“So what?” asked Dastou. “I came here as a courtesy to this city, I don’t care if a bunch of people with a day off are here.”
<
br /> “But they are here explicitly for... I meant...” the boy stammered again, looking for better words. “I mean to say, I was told to ask if you want to congregate with them after the meeting. They will likely still be there hoping to see you.”
Dastou put a hand to his forehead in frustration. He had no idea dealing with this relatively new political power in Blackbrick required so much hand-holding.
“Why, why,” Dastou began, “would I want to ‘congregate’ with that crowd? I’ve never given you, your bosses, or anyone else the idea that I was at all interested in public appearances or fame of any kind. Tell whatever idiot relayed that question to you that those people outside are not my responsibility, and I’m not going anywhere near there.”
In general, Saints disliked worship. In the history of their kind, only a handful of the previous forty-seven actually cultivated the idea that they were gods to be renowned. And in diaries or other notes, the others around those few men and women thought of the fame-hogs as complete assholes. Dastou was probably not a great guy, but wading into a crowd of worshippers or “fans” would ruin the rest of his month with how annoyed he’d be.
In the couple of seconds Dastou had those thoughts, the young man on the phone audibly gulped with nervousness. “Of course, I’ll tell them that right now.”
Dastou waved and Saan took the hint to cut off the intercom.
“Ridiculous,” Nes said.
“Hmph,” Saan grunted in agreement.
Dastou took a loud, exasperated breath. “Hopefully turning my pissed-off lever that far up ends with these people getting a little more thoughtful. Let’s go get this over with,” he said as he stood up.
There was a full-length mirror in the small office and Dastou walked to it to check on himself before stepping out. Dastou was wearing what he always did: a yellow-brown leather jacket, white buttoned shirt, black jeans, and brown boots. He had dozens of each piece of clothing in his closets. His eyes were the flat gray of any Saint, earned after a few years of training, and stood out sharply against his dark skin. He wondered, as he often did, if it felt strange to blush, which his skin tone wouldn’t allow. Someone he loved very much some time ago blushed regularly, and he always found it sexy when she did. He shook his head out of that space, as he didn’t feel like letting in a bout of depression or loneliness, and glanced back at his friends.
Nes was checking himself in the same mirror, making sure his expertly tailored dress uniform was absolutely perfect. The dark-gray with vermilion trim of the clothing made him look dangerously handsome. He was tall and muscled, in near-perfect shape, and the uniform only added to his confident attitude. The badge he wore was larger than normal, and announced him as “Corporal Nesembraci Jaydef.” Nes’ hair was always immaculately trimmed and conditioned, the shoulder-length brown locks making his gray-green eyes good and sharp.
Next to him, Saan wore her regular work clothes, a simple uniform in the same dark-gray and deep red as Nes’ outfit. She wasn’t looking at the mirror, instead straightening some of Nes’ paperwork for him. She was a blonde with gray-blue eyes, her straight-as-a-sunbeam hair down to her shoulder blades and styled without attention to trying to impress anyone. She tended to dress better, in more revealing and, almost always, tighter outfits at the academy, but she wanted to be uninteresting on this visit. No badge at all for her. She hated when strangers called her by name; her subtle, vowel-chewing accent gave away where she was from and, to those whose knowledge extended to tribal customs, why she didn’t have a last name.
Dastou’s attention was taken away from his companions by a teeny sound in the air, a whining hum. He tilted his head like a dog to try and find it.
“Anyone else hear that?” Dastou asked.
“Hear what?” Nes wondered.
“Like... a small hum or something. Machinery, maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Hmmm,” Saan murmured. “The phone, I can hear something through the speaker.”
Dastou turned back to face the desk and Nes was bending over, his ear close to the intercom.
“Oh, yeah, it’s there, I got it,” Nes said. “An electronic noise... chirping, here and there. I recognize this. A radio signal, I think, interfering with the intercom’s wired connection.”
On his security check for this place, Nes revealed that the embassy had no communication equipment outside of intercoms and telephones. Wireless communication of any kind was fairly restricted world-wide, and only Ornadais Academy used it so freely that it wasn’t rare for them.
“Radio, as in people talking?” Dastou asked, suspicious.
“No,” Nes told him. “The chirping is regular.”
Without thinking twice, and upset at himself for not doing it a few seconds earlier, Dastou up-shifted. His brain activity was now at a higher state, allowing him more time to analyze, think, calculate, solve. Everything slowed for him. He stepped toward the desk, the three paces taking far longer in this frame of mind. He heard the chirping clearer now, the snippets of interference sharp and clean. There was something familiar about them, yes, but the sound coming in as through a secondary source, the phone, confused him. He kept thinking, going through the ridiculous number of things he’s learned over the years, most of it pushed away from top-of-mind so he could keep himself as from losing his mind in data.
Nes must have caught what it was, his expertise in mechanics letting him think it through quickly, because the man’s face was suddenly pale with panic. Dastou understood it, too, but he understood it better and already had his mouth open in a scream.
“Get down!” Dastou yelled at the top of his lungs as his brain down-shifted to normal.
Dastou dove to the front of the crescent moon desk and landed near Saan. The others followed his unexpected lead and were suddenly down right next to him.
Before anyone could say anything more than “oof!”, the wall behind the desk blew apart. The explosion was instantly deafening, and Dastou also instinctively closed his eyes at the noise. When he could focus again, his ears were ringing, his head, too. When he opened his eyes, the room spun momentarily, but the dizziness quickly abated and he studied the room. There was debris all over, concrete dust in the air and slathered over millimeter of this place. When he looked at the desk, something was wrong, it was angled strangely, as if elevated, teetering. Dastou watched the furniture tilt back down from its position and land hard, a reminder that if it was any less sturdy it would have been flipped on top of him and his friends. No longer moving, the desk was still partially tilted, and a quick glance revealed that some broken-off part of the wall was stopping the desk from lying flat.
The Saint’s ears still rang while he gaped openly at the wall behind where he had been sitting, his attention of the huge hole in it. From the ground up, the opening was half-as-tall as Dastou and blocked with debris. That wall bordered the west wall of the building, but concrete dust brought visibility down to almost nothing beyond the opening, and he couldn’t see outside. The fog was dissipating fast, though, and he was able to see more of the floor in this office, which was littered with debris, small or large chunks of something or other. Offhandedly, he looked for the chair he’d been sitting in and found that the comfortable, cushioned seat had been obliterated by the blast. Only a few leftover shards were bigger than his hand, and all hard to see in the stifling air. After a few more seconds, the ringing in his ears stopped, and he could tell his companions could also hear.
“Fucking void,” was all Nes said, cursing twice, his voice muffled.
Nes was wiping at his face with a sleeve, clearing the pale dust from his eyes, nose, and mouth. Dastou did the same, and Saan was shaking her head to let loose concrete pebbles out of her hair.
“Put your ears in,” Dastou ordered before coughing a few times.
They all had standard throat-mic packages with them as demanded by protocol, the palm-sized transceiver box clipped to their belts. They pulled out small receivers from pockets and put them in their ears, then attach
ed circular, wireless vibration patches on their throats and thumbed on the transceivers.
“...Sir, can you hear me!?” said a young woman’s voice through Dastou’s earpiece. It was Evara, one of six others that came with them to Blackbrick. She would be outside, on a roof somewhere.
“Yeah, yeah,” answered Dastou before coughing again. “Were here. Alive, unhurt, I’m pretty sure.
“Good,” Evara said, relieved, “I saw part of some explosion from here, but there were others, outside. Three bombs placed around the front of the embassy.”
“Bombs?” Nes said, bewildered.
“Who set them?” asked Dastou, already picturing himself choking someone.
“No idea. Some people slipped in front of the crowd, dropped bags then walked away. A few seconds later three bombs went off at the same time,” Evara continued, “a lot of people out here are hurt, panicking. A lot are dead, too.”
“What in the black is all this?” Dastou asked in a whisper, almost to himself.
There was a young man’s voice in the background that came through the ear piece, and then Evara piped in again. “Sir, more problems. There are people rushing into the embassy for safety. A few others are coming down the street from the north, toward the building, masked and armed.” Evara paused, probably looking through her monocular for details. “Knives, clubs, things like that. Do you want us to stop them?”
Evara was a spotter, her brother a sniper, and they were together. What the girl meant was should they kill all of the armed attackers before they reached the embassy. Those two were brutal and highly skilled, they would kill all of those armed people without hurting anyone else, and do so with little affect to their psyches. That would end their troubles quickly, but create the possibility of more panic, ricochets.
“No,” Dastou ordered. “Let them come, I’ll take care of them. Nes, come with me to the lobby, help the civilians stay safe. Saan...”
“I have an idea, sir. I’ll explain after,” Saan said, her hurried state of mind causing her to use a rare contraction in her speech.
“Sure, go.”
All three of them rushed out of the wrecked office, avoiding concrete detritus. In the hallway, Saan ran in one direction to do whatever she had in mind. Dastou and Nes went the other way, toward the lobby, toward more trouble.
~~~~
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 2