The dust began to settle and Saturn tilted her boot against the accelerator, only to release it after traveling just a few meters. On the side of the street lay the body of a Dinari child with sand-colored scales, blackened in spots where he’d been struck by an Ansaran laser blast. He must have only been ten Earth years of age, fewer by Dinari standards. Saturn knew the Dinari lived longer lives than humans, but the mystery was by how much? His body was mangled in a gruesome way, blood still trickling out of the partially cauterized wound. What did drip down to the packed sand of the street congealed into a gruesome mud. Saturn’s eyes drifted up the three-story clay wall behind the child’s body.
The words emblazoned there were still fresh, dripping red drops down the sandy wall, guided by the many cracks that ran down to the very foundation. The chip implanted at the base of Saturn’s neck translated the foreign symbols scrawled out before her. It read: Dinari Rising.
Saturn looked back to the child on the side of the sandy street and noticed his small clawed hand was covered in a red dye that would have been easy to mistake for blood. Perhaps things were even worse than she had imagined.
She gripped the leather handles of her hover bike and angrily slammed down on the accelerator, increasing its speed until she began to have tunnel-vision. The readout displayed her location. She was approaching Sestra’s shop. Reluctantly, she eased off the power and let herself slow to a more maneuverable speed, turning into a narrow alleyway and pulling up behind Ju-Long’s deserted bike. He couldn’t have been inside for long because the dust hadn’t yet settled around his vehicle.
Saturn powered down her hover bike and dismounted, wiping away the sand that had accumulated in the cracks of her tan pants. They were baggier than she preferred, but after a little experience in the desert she found that keeping a little distance between her skin and her clothing kept her from overheating. She adjusted the shoulder straps on her dusty white tank top and could feel a sunburn coming on quickly. She’d left in such a hurry she’d forgotten her cloak.
Looking both ways in the thin alley, she saw no one. Without bothering to knock, she pushed through the door to Sestra’s shop, which was crafted from a dozen wooden planks cut to match the front entrance. Inside, she saw a number of curiosities scattered about on the rickety handmade shelves, with more still presented on pedestals of stone that jutted up from the foundation every so often. Saturn had only been in the shop a few times before, and could honestly say that none of the experiences had been particularly pleasant. Still, she enjoyed seeing the odd gadgets that filled Sestra’s displays and found herself imagining the various purposes of the many devices.
A raspy voice called to her, “You can look, but I’m afraid most of what you see would cost you more favors than you could repay in a lifetime.”
Saturn turned and regarded the squat Dinari female. Her features were softer than Nix’s, her scales seeming to have fewer deep grooves between them which made her skin almost smooth to the casual onlooker. Saturn had remembered the Dinari’s scales being burned from the sun the first time they’d met, but in recent visits she appeared to have stayed indoors because her skin had returned to a paler sand color. Like Nix, her eyes were bulbous and gold, with vertical black slits that changed significantly with the light. Her nose was somewhere between a human’s and a snake’s, with slits for nostrils which curled around, culminating in small circle.
Her garments clung tightly to her body, in contrast to her usual cloak with a high cowl. The Dinari’s form was fit, which surprised Saturn. With the Dinari’s raspy voice and chilly demeanor she’d always assumed the shopkeeper was far older. Without her cloak to obscure her shape, it was clear that Saturn had been mistaken.
“Come now, Sestra,” Saturn responded in kind. “Nothing in here looks very expensive.”
“Yes, but you have nothing I want,” Sestra quipped.
Saturn’s mouth curled up into a smile. She never could tell exactly where she stood with Sestra. When Nix wasn’t around she wasn’t the kindest person, yet she’d always comply with Nix’s requests. There was a story there that she hadn’t been able to beat out of her Dinari companion.
“So the Ansaran has been giving you trouble I hear?”
The Dinari grimaced and rasped angrily, “Insufferable. Unbearable! If you don’t take her with you when you leave—”
Saturn crossed her arms and asked, “You’ll what?”
“I don’t know what I did to deserve this. It seems all I do for you people is favors and I get stuck with an Ansaran in my home. Do you know how insulting that is? I chose my line of work specifically to avoid such an arrangement.”
“Calm yourself. It’s only temporary.”
“Temporary suggests an end. I’ve heard of no timeline for her removal.”
“She has information we need. When we have it, other arrangements will be made. Off-world arrangements.”
Saturn thought she saw Sestra smile briefly, but it seemed so out of character for her she half-convinced herself she’d imagined it.
“Show me to her.”
“You’ll have to pry that brute off of her if you want to talk.”
“Let me worry about Ju-Long.”
Sestra nodded and led her around the glass counter at the back of the shop and through the tattered-cloth curtain. The Dinari reached up to the low ceiling and grabbed an orb of light the size of her fist. The orb wasn’t attached to anything, much like the orbs that floated near the ceiling of The Sand’s Edge bar. One of these days, Saturn was going to get around to asking how they worked. When she did, she’d ask someone with a bit more personality than Sestra.
At the end of the tight, winding corridor, they came to an open area with shelves lined with gadgets of all types and purposes. Saturn only knew the purpose of one of the devices on the shelf. Her eyes found the copper-colored goggles sitting on a shelf just below eye level. When she looked into the lenses she was reminded of Liam’s screams as he fought the link that connected his mind to Toras. At the time, alien telepathic links were shocking. Now, that sort of thing was just another day.
Sestra continued past the wobbly shelves and through a narrow corridor that Saturn had never been down before. It was only wide enough for a few extra centimeters on either side of her shoulders. Saturn wondered how Ju-Long was even able to fit inside the tiny passage.
Sestra pulled one of the hallway doors closed, light still barely seeping from under the door. The Dinari kept walking without explanation, pulling Saturn along by her upper arm. Saturn examined the door as they passed by what little light reflected off the walls from Sestra’s glowing orb. The door’s planks were a bare, unfinished wood that appeared newer than the rest of the entryways they’d passed.
“What’s back there?” Saturn asked.
“None of your concern.”
Sestra released her arm and shined the light in her face. Up close, Saturn could see individual specs of gold swirling in the pulsing orb as though populated by a colony of microscopic fireflies. Sestra’s face might have been carved out of rock, her facial muscles frozen in a look of scorn. The Dinari’s mouth curled up into a slender smirk and she continued, “Maybe when you’re ready.”
Sestra moved the light to the rickety boards that formed a solidly-built doorway. They’d reached the end of the passage without Saturn realizing. Light trickled out in several places where the planks didn’t quite come together. The Dinari gripped the rusted metal handle and put her shoulder into the door to open it. It swung inward, scraping along the stone floor and making an excruciatingly high-pitched noise.
Saturn stepped inside and saw Ju-Long sitting next to the Ansaran on a thin sleeping pad. She was examining Ju-Long’s hand and carefully picking out pieces of broken glass. The Ansaran’s skin was a paler blue than she remembered, with fine scales that were only truly visible in the right light and at the right angle. Her eyes were a swirl of blue and green and far smaller than the eyes of an Ansaran male. In fact, they were almost as sm
all as a human’s but far more exotic in shape. Like a Dinari, her pupils were vertical slits, now much wider than normal in the low light of the back room. Her pointed ears jutted back from her bald head and were probably her most memorable feature apart from the black geometric tattoos that lined her graceful neck.
The Dinari touched one of the holes on the side of her head that served as an ear. She shook her head out of frustration and said to Saturn in her gravelly voice, “I need to take care of something for Zega. She’s your responsibility now.”
5
Liam Kidd eased his foot off the hover bike’s accelerator and came to a halt in the alley outside one of Zega’s many warehouses. The building was a single story structure made from a mix of clay and corrugated metal. It housed a number of items, the manner of which changed based on Ansaran inspection schedules. Zega’s spies had a knack for uncovering the schedules far enough in advance to play a sort of shell game with them.
Liam dismounted his bike and approached the corrugated metal doorway, which extended more than a meter over his head and was wide enough to fit three of him abreast. The sand under Liam’s feet was loose, a reminder that no one uninvited dared tread the ground nearby. A feeling crept up inside his stomach. The Dinari knew exactly what the little building was and who owned it. It was no different than the many buildings owned by Vesta Corporation on Earth. Word had a way of spreading quickly. Liam put his palm against the sensor to the right of the door and gears began to churn behind the metal until the door finally slid up on its track.
Inside, a single orb of light illuminated near the ceiling at the center of the room, the rays hardly managing to penetrate the densely populated chamber. The sun that penetrated the room from the outside wasn’t much help either. The building couldn’t have been more than ten meters square and had a few rows of steel shelves filled with hard-shelled boxes and leather bags bulging in awkward places. He pulled a flat disc the size of a Terran credit out of his pants pocket and held it up in his palm. A hologram projected outward, its orange hue coloring the dimly lit walls.
Numbers scrolled through countless iterations until they finally fell on a three and a four, appearing as lines and dots that his mind translated for him into Earth Common. Liam counted three shelves from the left and looked up to the fourth shelf, just above eye level. The sole item on the shelf was a brown leather bag that was as long as his arm, a single strap running the length of it. The bag bulged in places that made his thoughts run rampant. The thought that anything could have been in that bag excited him to no end.
Liam returned the thin disc to his pocket and grabbed the bag’s strap. When he pulled it from the shelf, the weight of it nearly took his shoulders out of their sockets as the bag clunked to his feet. He heard a strange metallic sound from within that reminded him of his time as a smuggler. Terran credits had been light; made from a material that had tracking software built in that was immensely difficult to counterfeit and had the benefit of also being nearly indestructible. Because of this, Vesta Corporation preferred to deal with gold as it was harder to track. He was beginning to understand why Zega had sent him on this job. It was a payoff.
•
Nix crawled closer to the edge of the rooftop, straining his eyes in his magnifying goggles. He focused the lenses on a small building’s open door, a hover bike standing empty outside. Nix had seen buildings like that before, and it usually spelled trouble. He squinted, and through the dim entryway, Nix saw him. Liam’s human appearance was unmistakable. Add in the tangled blond hair and deep facial scar and he stood out like a Narran Flemox. Nix smiled at the thought of the giant amphibian with its bright purple skin and pustules that oozed stinky green liquid from its pores. Liam was carrying a brown bag out of the warehouse, struggling with the weight. It took him a minute to heave it onto his hover bike and mount up. The building’s metal door automatically closed as Liam sped away, his bike hardly seeming to notice the increased burden.
Nix removed the goggles and rested his elbows on the hardened clay lip at the edge of the rooftop. The sun’s glare found his eyes and made him lower his gaze to the street down below. That street ran along the whole edge of Sector Seven and had few residents. The outskirts of the colony were hardly a place for the civilized. Nix didn’t like the look of things. Whatever job Zega had Liam doing was anything but benign. He needed to find out what was in that bag. It had been heavy. Was it weapons? The bag would only have held a few Ansaran lasers so it seemed unlikely.
The Dinari came up to his feet and powered up his hover bike, waiting patiently with its almost silent idling hum. He mounted the long vehicle and turned on the square map display. Nix could see Liam’s bike approaching one of the larger spires in the area. It was the one in closest proximity to the Caretaker’s tower, near Sector Eight. He swiped his hand through the image and the hologram disappeared. Angrily, Nix pointed his toe, forcing the accelerator down to full, shooting off the edge of the roof and coming down on the street below, sending sparks out the back of his bike as it cut into the sand. Behind him, a plume of dust rose violently into the air.
•
Liam craned his neck in an attempt to make out the top of the spire before him. It was no use. The tower faded out of view, swallowed up by the orange and yellow sky. Liam powered down his bike and dismounted. An Ansaran guard quickly approached him, clad in his sand-colored armor and oblong helmet that accentuated his sloping head and angular chin. The many small plates that made up his armor had been filled in with sand so that with every movement bits of the coarse powder sprinkled down to the ground. He was a jittering hourglass who never seemed to run out of sand to count the seconds.
“State your purpose,” the guard said in a deep voice that reverberated against the hardened material that protected his neck.
Liam gripped the strap on the dense leather bag and lifted it off the back of his hover bike, heaving it over his shoulder with great effort.
“Vidu expects me.”
The Ansaran guard tilted his head, examining Liam’s bike. Liam could see the faint outline of green text flowing behind the Ansaran’s black visor. Perhaps instructions from an unseen master. A moment later, the alien lowered his weapon and stepped to the side. He cautioned, “Vidu doesn’t like outsiders.”
“He’ll like me.”
Liam brushed past the guard and approached the Spire’s massive double doors. Each of the spires he’d seen had different nuances, as though the architect was different for each, but they’d all had the same master. The building was distinctly Ansaran despite the swirling detail engrained in the door that was decidedly at odds with the Caretaker’s tower. The doors were tall enough to fit a Kraven, easily four meters in height.
The thick doors swung inward when Liam was within a few steps of the entrance. Inside, a staircase wound up and around to his left, disappearing behind the ceiling ten meters above in an ascent Liam knew led all the way to the top of the spire, should one have the energy. To his right was a slab of stone that was cut out of the single piece that formed the floor. Liam made his way over to the platform and knelt down in the center, something he’d learned from previous encounters with the strange technology.
Purple light illuminated the square cutout of stone and the platform rose up nearly a meter before shooting off in the opposite direction as the staircase, moving as though along a double helix, spiraling up the tower at speeds that could hardly have been considered safe. Liam braced his palms against the stone and tried not to look out the windows that lined the spire. The concave glass filled in the grooves of the tower as would a screw. Nix had once told him that the grooves helped funnel the wind, which allowed them to build even higher. He’d also mentioned that the glass was almost as strong as stone. Liam had seen the strange properties of the glass before, enough at least to know it wasn’t the same as any glass he’d seen on Earth.
After passing countless floors, each providing only a glimpse at the lifestyles of the Ansaran residents, the platfor
m began to slow and Liam finally cautioned a glance outside. He was so high up that the Dinari structures below were indistinguishable from the sand around them, but for the tiny pinpricks that milled around the streets and scarce vehicles that sped along the dirt roadways. The stone square stopped and dropped into a slot on the floor, the purple light dissipating even more quickly than it had appeared.
Liam rose up to a standing position, the leather strap of the bag cutting into his shoulder under the strain. He shuffled off the platform and approached a white door with precise lines and a sheen that reflected light back at him from the window. The reflective double doors opened as he approached and he was met by two Ansaran guards wearing the same sand-colored armor as the Ansaran outside, only theirs was pristine by comparison. They examined him momentarily before stepping aside to let him pass.
Liam entered the large antechamber and immediately noticed that the floor was made from the same white material as the doors, its polish reflecting the light from the many windows as he walked. The guards closed the doors behind him and Liam looked back over his shoulder. He could see right through the entryway into the landing outside as though the door was half translucent.
“Who has Zega sent this time?”
The haughty voice made Liam turn back to his front, where an Ansaran stood, clad in white armor that covered his shoulders and torso, his pale blue skin contrasting with the brilliant ashen plates. His leggings emulated the tiny scales that covered his body, much like that of a fish, only these were harder and with jagged edges that didn’t look safe to touch. At his shoulders were ornate silver leaves which were connected by a chain that hung down over his chest. They supported a light blue cape that was so unspoiled it could never before have left the spire. Anything that graced the streets of Garuda was immediately touched by sand.
The Corsair Uprising Collection, Books 1-3 Page 35