by M. D. Cooper
Niki added.
“Really?” Rika asked. “When was that?”
Something in Niki’s tone hinted to Rika that her AI was not ready to discuss the encounter in depth, and she decided to let the matter slide for now.
“OK, then,” she said to Piper. “It’s agreed. You’ll stay on the Fury Lance.”
Rika took a careful step back, not wanting to mess up Stripes’ web of power lines, and gazed up at the AI’s core.
“Niki and I have both been prisoners in our own minds and bodies before. Inflicting that on another sentient is simply not something we’d ever do.”
Piper didn’t respond for almost an entire minute.
Piper laughed softly.
Rika breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks for that, Piper. I know trust is hard to come by these days. Hopefully we’ve set a good foundation for it and will earn more as time goes on.”
“Ummm…of course. I’m an open book.”
“Well, I’ll do my best. I broke my crystal ball awhile back, so I’m just winging it.”
“Seriously, Niki. Analyzing the joke ruins it. What’s the question, Piper?”
“Won what?” Rika suspected Piper’s meaning, but she wanted him to clarify.
“Do you ask that because it enslaved both of us?” Rika asked, pushing toward the point.
“I am Genevian, as is Leslie,” Rika countered. “You seem to like both of us well enough.”
Rika didn’t know how to answer, largely because she didn’t have one. “I’m hoping that people will figure out how to put things back together. My job is just to kick the Niets out, and then keep on kicking.”
“Unless Tanis tells me otherwise.”
“Oh?” Rika asked, curious what it was.
Rika’s mouth fell open, as that one word spoke volumes. “Did you know about this, Niki?”
“Care to share?”
Rika put a hand out, grasping the corner of Piper’s node. “Shit…does that mean that when she gave me my…vision…she was ascended?”
“I guess that explains how she was able to blast a hole through a hillside.”
Piper made a strange snorting sound.
“Tanis—uh…Tangel—is one of the best people I’ve ever met,” Rika countered.
“I’m aiming more for ‘cut through it like a hot knife through butter’ than ‘liberate’,” Rika clarified. “The current plan is to drive almost straight to Genevia. Take out the Nietzschean regional command there, and then push on to Purzia. I have a date with Emperor Constantine.”
Rika let go of Piper’s core and nodded as she looked up at him. “We have momentum. I don’t intend to lose it. Not to mention I have the ISF ready to jump in and lend a hand.”
“They came two days ago and saved us after we saved you. I’d say their track record is pretty good.”
Piper sounded as though he still had reservations, but wasn’t going to press further.
“Don’t worry—well, don’t worry yet, at least,” Rika said with a laugh. “I plan on testing the waters a few times before we get to Purzia. Right now, that part of the plan is little more than wishful thinking, as well. Once we take the Genevia System, then we’ll see about moving onward.”
That exact differentiation had never occurred to Rika before, and she couldn’t help but feel some measure of agreement with Piper.
“I think that would be just,” she replied.
Then his words, ‘what you’ll do with Genevia’ struck her like a blow from Adira’s war hammer. What I’ll do? Stars, I hope it doesn’t fall to me.
Niki sent a feeling of agreement as she replied to Piper’s statement:
“Of course,” Rika replied and carefully made her way over the mess of power conduits. “Reach out to either of us if you need anything. We’ll be boosting for another day before we make the jump to Iberia, and then it’s sixty days in the dark layer.”
“Talk to you soon,” Rika said in parting as she left the node chamber.
Rika mused, her thoughts drifting off as she wondered what things must be like for Tangel.
Rika pursed her lips as she reached a lift bank and hit the call button.
Niki sent Rika a mildly disparaging feeling.
OLD NEWS
STELLAR DATE: 12.07.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Chusa District, Cerulean, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Tremon, are you ready, yet?” Yakob called out, standing next to the apartment’s door. “If we miss the train at this time of day, it’s an hour till the next one.”
Tremon walked out of his room, pulling on his coat as he glanced at Yakob and gave his old friend a slow shake of his head. The man was obsessed with being early for everything. Even after all these years when it didn’t really matter anymore.
“You know it only takes fifteen minutes to get to the station,” Tremon said as he finished buttoning his coat and drew his cane out of the tall, wooden tube next to the door. “And the train doesn’t even arrive for twenty-five.”
Yakob opened the apartment’s door and held it wide for Tremon. “Fifteen if you don’t stop to greet half the people you meet on the way—which I wish you wouldn’t do. It’s not like you’re running for office.”
“Old habits,” Tremon said with a slight shrug as he walked out into the hall, his cane tapping as quietly as he could manage on the wooden floors.
He didn’t need the cane to walk, not exactly, though it did help him manage a bit longer. His left knee had never fully healed, and it was a long trip to the doctor he trusted enough to take a look at it.
An old man’s foolish fear, he chided himself.
The pair walked in silence to the elevator and then rode down the four floors to the ground level. Squeaks and groans accompanied their short descent, and Tremon was glad for another safe arrival when the doors opened.
He knew there was slim risk of the elevator car falling, but he couldn’t help the worry. So much had gone wrong in the last decade of his life, death by elevator seemed as though it would be a perfect end-cap.
“What news do you think Gloria has for us?” he asked as the two men walked through the small lobby and then out onto the street.
Yakob’s keen eyes swept across the street once, and Tremon knew he’d drawn in every detail. From the four Huro girls throwing dice on the stoop two doors down, to the barely visible figure of Tamar, the enforcer for Torin’s gang who stood in the shadows across the narrow street.
Granted, it was easy for the man to stand in shadow. The way the buildings loomed over the ten-meter-wide street, hardly any light filtered down to ground level.
Even in daylight hours, a fair amount of the street’s illumination came from the sign hanging on the opposite building, which shone in a garish green and yellow, announcing that Flora’s Den was ‘the best place to spend your money—and your night’.
Five years ago, the existence of places like Lorde Street, tucked deep in the bowels of Cerulean’s Chusa District, was what Tremon would have considered to be an intellectual fact. Now it was a visceral one.
Satisfied that none of the usual suspects were likely to leap out and accost the pair, Yakob walked down the apartment building’s short staircase, and Tremon followed after.
“I don’t know,” Yakob said after they’d walked a few paces, and it took a moment for Tremon to recall the question he’d asked—which was about what intel Gloria may have for them.
They walked past the street’s four Huro Girls, their jet-black skin embedded with yellow lights that raced across their bodies, twisting around their limbs and eventually reaching the Huro gang symbol that glowed on their foreheads.
Their hairless look was topped off by solid yellow eyes and lips, and under their artfully draped cloaks, Tremon knew them only to wear weapons.
Yakob kept one eye on the group. The four girls pretended not to be concerned with his passage, but Tremon knew that when he and his guardian had first taken up residence in this neighborhood, the local Huro Girls had tried to shake Yakob down.
‘Tried’ being the operative word—there used to be five of them throwing dice on that stoop.
The three words that Yakob had given in response to Tremon’s question meant that the man didn’t want to discuss the nature of Gloria’s summons.
His reticence didn’t surprise Tremon. Their chief informant rarely had any good news. Usually it was information about some new nation that the Nietzscheans had defeated and absorbed into their empire.
Though she had, from time to time, brought news of a few resistance groups who were harrying the empire.
In all honesty, Tremon didn’t know why they all bothered—he, Yakob, and Gloria, not the resistance groups. There was no way he was ever going to resume anything close to the position he’d had before the war.
For reasons Tremon didn’t understand, and certainly didn’t question, Yakob and Gloria stayed loyal to him, affording Tremon the same protection he had before the surrender to Nietzschea.
He often wondered if Yakob stayed with him out of pity. There was no doubt in his mind that without his companion’s keen eye, not to mention his highly effective fists, Tremon would be long dead.
He also didn’t know why they remained within the borders of the old Genevian Alliance. There were a million places they could go, but for some reason, they’d made it this far, and gone no further.
Tremon sometimes mused that it was because they knew that once they left former Genevian space, all hope would be lost.
And so here we stay, like ghosts clinging to our rotting corpse.
They walked in silence for a few more minutes, and came upon another of the street’s denizens sitting on the curb.
“Hello, George, how are you today?” he asked the older man with a long beard that reached his waist.
“Shitty,” George muttered. “Same as when you asked me two days before, and the week before that.”
Tremon laughed and shook his head. “Glad to hear that you’re staying consistent, George.”
“Small victories, Tremon. Small victories.”
He greeted a few other locals as they walked the length of Lorde Street, then the pair turned onto Avonlea Boulevard, where there were more pedestrians, and a few groundcars meandering down the surface road.
The buildings were over thirty meters apart on the boulevard, and Tremon had a clear view of the blue sky overhead and the pristine buildings that rose over Cerulean on the other side of the river.
Above the skyline, disappearing into the clouds, he could see the towers of Upper Mdina and Tarxien. From his current vantage, the other two spires, Ceru Heights to the north, and Sorna to the south, were obscured.
Those structures rose over ten kilometers into the air, housing millions of Cerulean’s people, each tower nearly self-sustaining, not requiring the denizens to ever leave their vertical cities.
Sometimes he missed such luxuries. Though the two men could live
in comfort in one of the towers—or even in one of the wealthier eastern districts—they opted to keep to themselves in a part of the city where no one dug into your business because they didn’t want you digging into theirs.
After only two more short stops to talk with locals, Tremon and Yakob reached the stairs leading down into the Avonlea Boulevard station.
The moving staircase hadn’t worked the entire time they’d lived in the Chusa District, and Tremon was beginning to believe that no one had any intention of ever fixing it.
He certainly wished they would. The moving steps were a bit larger than normal, and the extra stretch put more strain on his knee than he’d like.
Back when he and Yakob had first taken one of the underground maglevs from the spaceport to Chusa, Tremon had expected the stations to be dangerous and in disrepair.
Surprisingly, the opposite had proven to be true. It turned out that the local police cared more about the maglev stations than the roads above.
Yakob had explained that since trains granted access to the whole city, letting criminal elements control the stations would be the first step in giving unsavory elements the ability to strike anywhere in Cerulean within just a few minutes.
That was another thing he’d never had to personally deal with before the end of the war: that local police departments often had to make compromises based on factors such as available resources, funding, and the most effective places to control crime.
Still, it surprised him that there were so many criminals tucked away in places such as Chusa. He would have expected the mech program to have snatched them up during the war, feeding them into the grist mill.
Yakob believed that the high crime rate was because most of the people living hand to mouth in the city found themselves in those situations only after the end of the war, not during it.
Thinking back on the war always brought Tremon to one conclusion: if the Genevian fleets had been as effective as the mechs they carried, Nietzschea would have lost.
Not that it mattered anymore. What was done was done.
He told himself that frequently in the hopes that it would combat his crushing guilt. Sometimes it was enough to momentarily distract him, but most of the time, he couldn’t hide from his part in things.