Sci-Fi Fantasy Collection (A Citizen Tale Books 1 & 2)

by S. K. Holder

  He slept peacefully that night. His newly acquired specimen, lay in her own bed, three doors away in a drug induced sleep. Amelia slept in her cot in the far corner of the room where he could keep an eye on her.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next day, they rose early and took a small glider back to the caves.

  Skelos lifted his heavily sedated subject out of the vehicle. He hoisted the woman over his shoulder. She hardly weighed anything. Still, handling her caused him some discomfort. Her jutting bones struck his sides. Her hair scratched his face. Her skin had a crepe-like texture that reminded him of the skin of a dead lizard. He had the good sense to wear a face mask. He didn’t feel the dust in his throat. The fear that had almost consumed him the day before had subsided.

  To pacify Amelia, he had brought a house droid with him. He had also brought the few crates of equipment he had managed to salvage from his old Stores[3]. The droid carried the crates on the steel forks fitted to the base of its shell.

  Once in the new laboratory, the droid unpacked the crates.

  Skelos lowered his sedated subject onto the floor. He propped her against a wall and wrapped a folded blanket around her neck to prevent it flopping about. The last thing he wanted was for her neck to snap. Good specimens were hard to come by.

  Amelia sat obediently in her chair, awaiting her instructions. She wore a blue silk dress with a voluminous skirt and had insisted on bringing two more with her, in case another got ruined on account of his “cleaning demands”.

  Skelos detested the dresses and the ribbons as much as his ex-wife, Nylthia. But he had never denied her a dress or a ribbon. He owed her that much.

  He dragged a hologram chart from his tablet of notes. He heard a faint sound, so faint that he supposed he could have ignored it. Ordinarily, he would have. However, it reminded him that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of checking the adjoining vicinities. He had ceased his exploration of the caves when he had found the space he was looking for. Perhaps he had been too confident that no one else was around. I should check. Just to be sure.

  ‘Wait here,’ he told Amelia.

  ‘Why, Uncle? Where are you going?’

  The girl asked too many questions for his liking. ‘To look around. You keep a close eye on our subject.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘But what if she wakes? What shall I do?’

  Bash her over the head with my tablet. ‘Scream.’

  The little girl nodded, happy with his response.

  CHAPTER 3

  Skelos took the house droid with him to use as a decoy in case he needed to make a hasty getaway. He stumbled down one tunnel into the next.

  They branched and branched again.

  There were tunnels with walls of luminous rocks, others with walls thick with dust, or packed with mud. Some were ripe with the smell of dead things, and the wind howled through others.

  He had brought a route tracker with him to find his way back. He wasn’t about to get lost. Not this time.

  He eventually found the source of the faint sound. It belonged to one of them: the scourge. The diseased cattle. The Outsider stood in a cave bigger than the one Skelos had discovered and made his own. He realised he should have made the effort to venture further in search of a laboratory. This one would have better suited his needs. Its shelves were hewn from clefts. It had tables created from stacked rock slabs, all burdened with mysterious objects.

  He thought of the inexplicable pile of junk in his ante-chamber. It had never occurred to him that Outsiders had their own belongings. No doubt, they had stolen them from someone, somewhere.

  The Outsider’s hair was matted and thick with a white dust. His face was scrawny and lined. He wore a cotton shirt with the sleeves pushed up. A pair of odd looking transparent goggles covered his eyes. He stood next to a metal trolley with wheels and a box-shaped monitor with a cracked screen. Skelos noted other pieces of machinery with wires attached to them. He saw mechanical keyboards and other apparatus that he did not recognise.

  ‘You looking for something,’ said the Outsider.

  He had a crisp accent, one Skelos couldn’t place. It was not surprising. He had never heard one speak. But he had heard them scream. He doesn’t carry himself like an Outsider. He was not hunched over or rattling with fear. He stood straight and proud. His eyes were alive with…indignation. His clothes, which had once been pristine, were soiled rags.

  ‘Doctor Oliver Best.’ He approached Skelos with his right hand outstretched.

  There is no mark. ‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ he snapped.

  Outsiders did not have professions, or so he was made to understand by the Establishment. Outsiders couldn’t hold conversations. They were an insipid breed who could barely walk upright. You hardly needed a profession to scurry after lizards in the dirt. But some of the utensils the Outsider possessed appeared to be crude twisted versions of his own.

  Not an Outsider, Skelos concluded, but an Unmarked One[4] all the same. He had to presume he was a stowaway who came from another planet.

  ‘You seem a little skittish. Are you new?’

  ‘How dare you question me. How long have you been here?’

  ‘About a year.’ The Outsider looked him up and down. ‘You’re from out there, aren’t you?’ He sighed and bowed his head. ‘Who sent you?’

  ‘No one sent me.’ He continued to gaze around the cave. There were so many things, so many things he had never seen before. Where had they all come from?

  ‘But you are a Citizen. You’re not tolerant of any other race.’

  ‘Not true, and it has nothing to do with tolerance.’ Tolerance was too gracious a word for Pareusians’s to associate with Outsiders. ‘How did you end up here? Where did you come from?’

  ‘I would likely tell you if I thought you would believe me, and I trusted you. I don’t know you well enough to trust you. Suffice to say, I did not originate in the Red Caves. I merely seek refuge here.’

  ‘A clever answer.’ And one Skelos felt comfortable with for the moment. ‘What are you a doctor of?’

  ‘Medicine,’ replied Oliver.

  How dull. ‘I’m a doctor also.’

  ‘Your field?’

  ‘Neuroscience.’ Should I have told him that? He gestured to the cave. ‘What is all this equipment?’

  ‘Old technology. Instruments from the past. I found most of it. I imagine it’s been here for years.’

  Skelos nodded to a half rusting metal table on wheels. He pictured Ishara Molari on it. It would take her weight. ‘And this is where you sleep?’

  ‘No. I sleep on the ground.’ Oliver placed his hand on the wheeled table. This is a gurney.’

  Skelos gave him an inquisitive look. ‘For patients?’ Specimens.

  Oliver grinned. He had brown teeth. ‘You’re either a visionary – or you’ve seen one of these before.’

  No life-chambers or beds. ‘Then I’m a visionary.’

  Skelos stared around again. Dr Best stepped aside to allow him to do so.

  His gaze settled on a rack of trays laden with needles and plungers.

  ‘Syringes,’ said Oliver. ‘You slot needles into them and administer the drug to your patient or use it to withdraw blood.’

  Skelos had figured this out for himself, simply by the shape of the instrument. Dr Best pointed out more things to him: electrode gel pads, an ECG machine, amethyst drug jars, a machine that required a turnstile to play music, a steam kettle, a Culpeper microscope, a heart monitor... the list went on.

  Oliver informed him of a manner of instruments and equipment and how they worked. Skelos forgot that he was conversing with an Unmarked One. He found Dr Best to be articulate and intelligent. By the time Oliver had finished giving him a tour of the cave, Skelos was standing alongside him, squeezing some electrode gel on the back of his hand.

  ‘Is there anything here you like?’ said Oliver.

  Skelos had seen many instruments he could make use of. ‘Are you offering them?’

&nbs
p; Oliver chuckled. ‘In return for payment.’

  ‘Payment?’

  ‘What can you do with payment?’ Skelos liked him less now that he had the gall to ask to be paid for archaic equipment, most of which had never belonged to him in the first place. And payment requests were the rights of Citizens – no one else.

  ‘Go to Brevons Beach.’

  Brevons Beach was the home to mercenaries and gamblers. It was not a place for Citizens. Not First Status Citizens or Second, perhaps not even Third.

  ‘You seriously think I need these things?’

  ‘I do. You don’t strike me as a collector of antiques. You need these things, and you’re desperate. Desperate to conceal your business in this wasteland. You’re desperate to stay, and I’m desperate to leave. I can tell you how to work the equipment.’

  Skelos took out a bank card which amounted to six hundred spending credits. It wasn’t in his name. He had two more on him that held larger amounts. Four hundred would make Dr Best comfortable, unless he gambled it away. He handed it to the doctor, knowing that he didn’t have the means to check the amount of credit on the card.

  Oliver shoved the card into his pocket.

  ‘I’ll want as many of these things boxed up,’ said Skelos.

  Oliver nodded. ‘I’ll draw you up a list. You can come here any time and get more, if others haven’t gotten to it by then. Let’s make a start. I want to leave tonight.’

  CHAPTER 4

  With his new laboratory complete, Skelos set about testing his ECG machine. It worked as the doctor said it would. Dr Oliver Best had also given him an electricity generator. But Skelos didn’t need it.

  He used his Gift to bring the ECG machine to life. It beeped. The display panel came on.

  ‘Where did you get all this junk from, Uncle?’ said Amelia as she cleaned the gurney. She wore a pair of his surgical gloves that were not meant for her tiny hands; she struggled to hold her cleaning cloth.

  Skelos insisted that she do a thorough job of cleaning the rust-infested gurney. Who knew who had handled the instruments before him? He didn’t want to catch anything.

  ‘I bought them from a merchant.’

  Amelia stayed quiet for a full ten minutes mulling this over. ‘But it’s old,’ she said eventually. ‘Why would you buy old things?’ She ran her cloth in circles on the top of the gurney. She had polished it so much it gleamed.

  Skelos discovered the house droid broken in the corner. He picked up a fragment of its casing. It looked as if it had been smashed under the wheels of the gurney. It had two black curved dents in it. Acid had been poured over its circuits. ‘What happened to the droid?’

  ‘I don’t know. Its circuits got all burned up. I don’t think it could cope with all the dust.’

  Another noise disturbed him. Voices. Faint and unfamiliar. No footsteps.

  He left Amelia to her cleaning. He took to the myriad of tunnels, racing along in a torrent of fear. His Bolt-Shot whip in one hand, a laser gun in the other. He walked for longer than he had done the last time. The voices took him in a new direction, far from Dr Oliver Best’s chamber of treasures, far from his own. The voices confused him. They rose and died, rose and died, and they changed direction. He heard them to his left and to his right, above and below him.

  At last he found them concealed behind a bulging wall of rock.

  He was hesitant. He didn’t think it was possible to be caught so soon, but he couldn’t be sure. It would not bode well for him if there were other Citizens in the Caves. Not when he had made so much progress in so short a time.

  Two men were in conversation. One had a strong dominant voice; the other spoke in low whispery tones. One of them cares not to be heard, the other couldn’t care less.

  He was as close as he could get. He stood on the other side of the back of a cave. He found a small crevice belching air. He pressed his weight to the wall and peered through his spy hole. He saw the back of one of the men dressed in a white hooded robe. He could hardly see the other man’s face. He had dark skin. His greasy hair was tied back from his face. He noticed a silver ring on the Hooded Man’s finger. It had an eye-shaped rim and was set with a red gemstone.

  They are not Citizens. If they were they would have had me. Although the Greasy Haired One was not dressed in the finery of any class of Citizens he had ever come across. He could have been a Peltarck. Their race was known to dress roughly when in rough terrain.

  ‘You have served me well,’ said the Hooded Man. ‘Are you satisfied with your payment?’

  ‘More than satisfied. Thank you’, said the Greasy Haired One. He regarded his companion with twitchy eyes. ‘I know that my grandfather and his father before him asked that I keep this for you. I never believed in the prophecy. That one day you would come for it.’ He took up two worn bundles of cloth and laid them on the stone pedestal that stood between them.

  The Hooded Man untied the first bundle. Inside was a globe made of glass. He quickly unwrapped the second bundle, which contained three glass rods, blunt at both ends and no more than eight inches in length. They were nothing to look at, but Skelos couldn’t help but look.

  ‘I don’t believe in prophecies,’ said the Hooded Man. ‘This item has been in my family for generations. I’m simply retrieving it.’

  ‘It is not of this world?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I ask what it is? What it does?’

  ‘I will give you a demonstration.’

  The Greasy-Haired One fiddled with something behind his back. Skelos felt a chill on the nape of his neck. He shot a glance over his shoulder. He almost felt as if he was being watched.

  The Hooded Man lay his hands on the globe. Skelos started to see colours emerge within it. They were colours of the rainbow. The Greasy-Haired One watched mesmerised. Skelos was also mesmerised, but he could not fathom a reason. They were colours he had seen a million times before.

  ‘How are you doing this?’ The Greasy-Haired One was enthralled by the colours.

  He must be of a primitive race, thought Skelos. Rainbow colour displays were hardly ground-breaking.

  ‘It’s not me.’ The Hooded Man plucked one of the glass rods from the pedestal. ‘The quantities of Zichronite within these Shards assist in the working of this apparatus.’ He pushed the glass rods into the globe.

  After a short while, the Shards changed shape. They developed ragged edges, and then appeared to dissolve into the globe.

  ‘Is it magic?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  Either something was magic or it wasn’t. It couldn’t be both. Zichronite was an element; a rock found within the planet’s core. You could do as many things with the rock as you could with water. He had never seen it used to emit colours. Colours were pretty, and he suspected he could probably do the same thing with crystal orbs. But surely it wasn’t Zichronite that caused the Shards to melt. Perhaps the globe was hot. But then if it were hot, why would the Hooded Man continue to cup it with his bare hands?

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said the Greasy-Haired One.

  ‘Is it?’ asked the Hooded Man.

  The colours penetrated the walls. Skelos was thinking about how close they were to his new laboratory and about what the two men would do if they were to discover it. He had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  The Greasy-Haired One stood stiff and motionless, eyes fixed on the globe. Blood trickled from his nose onto his lip. The man licked his tongue. Skelos recoiled slightly. Red Blood caught in the glare of colours. It had been a long time since he had seen the blood of an Unmarked One.

  ‘May I go?’ the man asked the Hooded Man.

  Skelos pressed himself to the wall. No, not yet. He did not want the Greasy-Haired One to see him, and he got the impression that the demonstration was not over.

  ‘Not before you have taken your own life,’ the Hooded Man replied.

  The bare-chested man’s brows dipped in confusion. His nostrils flared. ‘With what?’

  Skel
os wasn’t certain he had heard right. Was that what he meant when he said, ‘May I go?’ It crossed his mind that he had he stumbled upon some strange ritual. And the nature of the men’s agreement was suicide.

  ‘With the blade you hold behind your back,’ said the Hooded Man, ‘the one you were going to plunge into my neck as you watched me observe the Avu’lore; the artefact I am using to control you.’

  The Greasy-Haired One smiled. ‘My apologies.’ He brought a large serrated knife from behind his back and slit his own throat in one clean sweep. The blood bubbled from the wound. He fell to the ground and the knife with him.

  The Hooded Man didn’t move for five minutes by Skelos’s estimate. Then he took his hands from the globe. The Shards reappeared. He pulled them out one by one and wrapped them back in the bundle of cloth he carried. He did the same with the globe. He placed his hand on a section of wall behind the pedestal. The section of the wall opened like a drawer. He slipped the Shards and the Avu’lore globe inside. He shut the drawer. There was no sign that it had ever been there. He then moved over to the body of the dead man, which was still oozing blood. He picked up the knife and placed it on the dead man’s chest. He then pulled out a small object that resembled a bundle of metal fibres. He held it over the body of the dead man. White lines appeared over the body for no more than five seconds, then the dead man was gone, the knife and the trailing blood on the cave floor.

  Skelos suppressed a gasp. The Hooded Man had frozen – still − as if he were listening for something.

  Skelos dashed back to the laboratory. The Hooded Man was not a Citizen, and he was not of his world.

  CHAPTER 5

  Skelos returned to his new laboratory and spent an hour trying to conceal its entrance lest the Hooded Man found him. He could barely think straight. If he was going to find a new location, he would need a minimum of two days − more − if he wanted to clear up after himself and dump the elder Citizen. He couldn’t just pack up and run.