Tales From The Edge: Emergence

by Stephen Gaskell

Who were these Epirians to hunt them down, fell them with shrapnel and bullet?

  I will not falter, she thought, but these were only words born of her mind and her body trembled. The Epirians and their relentless machines wouldn't hesitate to kill her given the chance. Perversely, the feeling gave her strength. During her instruction period, the Kaddar Alessi had warned her that dread may strike, paralyzing her into inaction, or worse, making her take flight. "This is your flesh speaking. Flesh that is weak, craven, always dying. Ignore the pleas of the flesh. Embrace the yearnings of the eternal mind. Think of the awaiting ecstasy."

  With his words tolling in her ears, she rose from the cold concrete, limbs and joints creaking with pain.

  Across the chamber, half-a-dozen Karist troopers stirred on the crude devotional benches, their murmuring orisons cut short by the Epirian invaders. Some cocked their heads, still confused as to the meaning of the grinding wail, while others concluded their prayers with common gestures towards the Maelstrom orb. Afterwards they fetched their helms from dark niches, secured the curved plates over their faces. The single tri-eye lenses masked the direction of their gazes, but she could still feel many of their eyes upon her.

  One boy—for he was certainly still a boy, no mistaking the dirt on his puppy fat cheeks for stubble—wasn't so subtle. He stared at her stooped form, fascinated and horrified. She knew the look well. The first time she stared at her own reflection weeks after she'd taken up permanent residence in the Devotional Chambers—countless hours of exposure to the Maelstrom radiation already clocked-up even then—she gave herself the same look. Sallow skin. The first sign of pustulent lesions. Bloody capillaries in the whites of her eyes, stark and radial, as if her pupils were tiny volcanoes from which scarlet lava had erupted. She couldn't imagine what she looked like now.

  Scabs on sores on scorched flesh, these days her skin looked more like geological strata than living tissue. Twenty-six years old by the orbit of her homeworld. Maelstrom knew how many by the reckoning of any biocellulist.

  "You need to leave," she croaked, vocal cords raw. "The enemy comes."

  His hand darted for his mouth, but the gorget that tapered up to a slender point near his lips got in the way. A thin, bilious-yellow drool spattered onto the concrete floor. She nodded for him to go, forget about cleaning up his vomitus.

  Nobody would be coming back.

  He didn't wait for her to change her mind, running out into the dim passage, his shadow quickly vanishing in the weak emergency lighting.

  Alone, she shuffled towards the Maelstrom orb in the heart of the chamber. Even in the short time since she'd got to her feet, the vitality of the forking lightning inside the orb had lessened. Elsewhere across the sanctuary, evacuating Karists would be dipping ammunition vials into the central pool of na-cybel energy, stocking votive candles, shields, energy cannons, every incarnation of weaponry from pulse rifles to swarmer grenades.

  They'd leave enough for her though. Safeguards would ensure that.

  Awkwardly, she stripped off her frayed robes, then pressed her twisted thumb onto the fingerprint scanner at the base of the orb's pedestal. Somehow, the machine could still identify her, and the orb decoupled from the reservoir with a mechanical grind. Her strength surprised her, and she had no difficulty lifting the orb, feeding her ravaged body and her crooked arms through its hollow middle. It fitted her snug like a life jacket, the release cord that could kill the magnetic entrapment field near her left shoulder. Cybel energy cascaded from her withered form. An illusion but still glorious. She redressed, making sure her robes concealed the light, and slipped out into the passage.

  The Kaddar Alessi had chosen one of the capital's abandoned reactor plants as the site of their sanctuary. A clever choice. Less than seven klicks away, slums spilled from the perimeter of the planet's largest Epirian shipbuilding yard like pus from a wound. Close enough for quick muster and devastation sorties, far enough to escape the reach of most Epirian patrols.

  Until now.

  She started off for the hub of the reactor plant, her right hand scraping along the wall for balance. The route was unfamiliar. She usually only moved between the Devotional Chambers, the washing stations, and the organics fabricators that nestled in a small alcove not a hundred paces from where she prayed.

  Still, she remembered where to go.

  A cadre of bare-chested Disciples fast-marched past, single-file, the dim sodium lighting reflecting off scar tissue, heavy boots, enhanced organs and limbs. The reactor plant spanned dozens of square klicks, a riddle of industrial sectors interlinked by a maze of passages, and the escape routes were numerous.

  They could power raft over the mirror-flat waters of the chain of lakes that flanked the eastern perimeter. They could descend into the radioactive waste disposal bunkers, then abseil down further into the old labyrinthine mining tunnels before hiking out to the disused pit mouth on the other side of the mountain. They could scurry through the subterranean sewers to emerge into Skillet Coast, Vermin Pike or one of the other Broken shitholes where they could go to ground.

  Until the Day of Communal Ascendancy, the Karist Enclave operated by one overarching doctrine: evasion.

  In a matter of days the sanctuary would reconvene elsewhere. Where she didn't know. It prickled her pride to be considered a liability with the knowledge, but she grudgingly accepted operational reasons dictated it be so. She wondered who would take her place, who would become the Kaddar Nova.

  The Disciples knew who she was, but not one turned their heads.

  Igeda's heart flared with happiness.

  Another day, Maelstrom willing, they would bring many into the light.

  Today that was her task alone.

  She hustled on. Her shoulders, already sloped and twisted, ached, and the Maelstrom orb pressed her crooked spine painfully. Tests of her stamina, her faith. It wasn't all pain, though. Intense visions slammed her mind, a taste of the coming glory. Magenta skies shattering into flocks of icy birds, the whispered truths coming from the cracks between the worlds, splashing through a technicolour creek where the water droplets that hit her skin fizzed and boiled.

  Nearby an Angel wailed, a discordant ear-splitting shriek. Igeda thought the sound was another invention of her churning mind, but glancing into the staccato light down one of the side passages she saw a Keeper wrestling with one of the frightening creatures. It sensed the cybel energy hidden beneath her robes, its unshackled serrated tentacles flicking and groping, wildly desirous.

  Igeda hurried on.

  As expected, she found the Kaddar Alessi in the plant's main control station, eyes fixed on the bank of cheap monitors that had been carefully stacked on the dusty consoles. The screens showed grainy feeds wired from the fibrecams strung up along the major routes into the heart of the plant.

  Shuffling, spider-like motions played on the top-left monitor, while another gave a view onto a handful of Acolytes hiding behind support columns.

  "Kaddar Nova." The Kaddar Alessi didn't turn. "May the Truth guide you."

  "I will follow the Truth," Igeda said, completing the standard Karist greeting.

  She shuffled to her leader's side. "Kaddar Alessi."

  Closer now, she could discern details of the Epirian invaders. Canine bots fanned out as much as they could through the choked passages, their blood-red eyes gleaming, while nervous soldiers stalked behind. Four, five, six, seven of them. Not the sort of numbers that might one day cause her name to be sung in awe, but respectable enough.

  On the other monitor, the Acolytes shifted, uneasy. Igeda picked at her memories of the layout of the plant, tried to work out the two groups relative positions. Her stomach balled. They weren't—they couldn't be—

  "The Acolytes plan to ambush the patrol," the Kaddar Alessi said matter-of-factly.

  Blasphemous! How dare they steal her honour!

  "Kaddar Alessi!" Igeda spluttered via her wrecked lungs. "You must—"

  "It's too late." He met her eyes, sympat
hetic. "I'm sorry, Igeda."

  In all their time on Zycanthus, all their time en route, in fact, he'd never once referred to her by her birth name. She was simply a Proselytizer, later becoming the Kaddar Nova on account of her piety.

  "Thank-you, Ariman."

  She remembered them standing in one of the homeworld forges, grappling with a steel pulley. The enormous metalloceramic plate they hoisted from the molten liquid would eventually form a tiny section of one of the Arks that the world endlessly built.

  Back then they could never have anticipated their journey together.

  Few left the homeworld forges, mines, or Ark yards.

  And now she stood on the cusp of having her most glorious moment taken from her by mere Acolytes!

  "The intemperance of youth." The Kaddar Alessi said, turning back to the monitors. No more intimacies would be shared. "They will be punished, of course."

  His work was far from done.

  Hers was almost over. Perhaps was over.

  Once a sanctuary had been compromised, there was only one path for a Kaddar Nova. And now these Acolytes threatened to deny her that final, crowning step.

  The monitor that tracked the invaders snapped to another feed. They were seconds from being ambushed, the Acolytes' guns twitching in their hands. The element of surprise, of familiarity with the battle space, would make it a massacre. Overkeen, the first Acolyte broke early, swivelled out from the pillar, crouching—

  He toppled backwards, his pulse rifle not even raised.

  Pandemonium ensued, blooms of cystalline light overloading the fibrecam's lense, while panicked energy weapons crackled. Robotic snarls punctuated the screams.

  When the smoke cleared the five Acolytes lay bloody and mangled, barely any distance from where they'd awaited the Epirian patrol. The canine bots crept about in the foreground, while their soldier handlers kicked muzzle-hot weapons from the Karists' dead hands.

  Igeda didn't understand. How—

  A thin shadow emerged from the gloom, green laser beams from shoulder-mounted weaponry scattering on the dissipating vapour. Defense drones orbited the figure in lazy circles. He strode forward, scanning left and right before his gaze alighted on the camera. The screen flared green, then cut to static. A prospector! Karists rarely encountered them.

  Nobody did.

  Igeda leaned against the reactor console, legs shaking.

  She was thrilled.

  The Kaddar Alessi cleared his throat. "The Novrost will be waiting for me." His voice trembled. The prospector had him terrified. Perhaps he was right to be afraid. Such an enemy could deny a Karist ascension in a heartbeat. "Illumination awaits."

  He didn't wait for Igeda's rejoinder, striding out of the room.

  "The blinding light will make me see," she finished with a whisper.

  As she watched the Epirians strike deeper into the complex, she consulted the plant's architectural plans, projecting the images from her wrist bracelet onto a bare wall. There. She stabbed a ravaged finger into the light. There she would meet them.

  A few minutes later, in the near-empty storage area she'd chosen as the place to make her final stand, she heaved herself up onto a stack of unused control rods that glinted steel grey, sat with legs dangling. Painful spasms wracked her body, the cybel energy cleansing her mortal frame, readying her for ascension.

  "Arms up!"

  She jerked awake. She must've dozed off. An Epirian soldier aimed a bulky pistol at her, not ten paces away. The robotic dogs padded around, sniffing at the other reactor materials scattered around the room, while the other soldiers swarmed past.

  There was no sign of the prospector.

  Her hands rested in her lap, and she raised them as best she could, biting her lip to stop herself crying out in agony.

  "Clear!"

  "Look how fucked she is, Rodriguez!" One of the soldiers leaned close, nose wrinkled with distaste. "Man, your Mamma looks better than this Karist scrag."

  "You know where I saw your Mamma, Nicks?"

  Part of her wanted to do it then. She counted five. They might fan out, split up. A little longer, she pleaded with herself. A prospector lurked somewhere nearby . . . it was worth the risk.

  "You think they recruit from the wrinklies? What are their demands again—free dentures for all?"

  "Shut it, Beans, you moron." The man pressed the barrel of his gun against a sore on the side of Igeda's forehead. "They got some weird ritual shit going on with the cybel energy, gives them a tan like they stepped out into a nuclear winter. Ain't that right, sister?" He tapped her head. "I said—"

  A point of light danced over Igeda's face. She heard the high-frequency buzz of defense drones. The soldiers quietened.

  He'd arrived.

  "Looks like the rest evacuated, sir."

  The prospector didn't say anything. He crept closer, eyes only for her.

  Close enough.

  She dropped her hand, went for the release cord—

  Something fizzed.

  Fierce pain exploded from the end of her arm, and when she looked—dumbstruck as to why she couldn't just clench her fingers, grab the damn cord, and pull—she found her arm ended with a bloody stump of mangled bone. She snatched at the cord with her left hand, but he'd closed the gap and now he was the one doing the grabbing, restraining her arm as easily as if he held a helium balloon.

  No! No, no, no, no!

  He couldn't do this. She had to feel the light. Illumination awaits. The Kaddar Alessi's final words now seemed mocking. This wasn't the revelation she wanted.

  She screeched and wailed, powerless, but the prospector didn't even flinch.

  A cutting laser lanced from his shoulder-mount, sliced through her robes. They fell away, acrid smoke curling up from the burnt fibres.

  "Holy shit. You see that shit, Rodriguez?" The coruscating light of the Maelstrom bathed the Epirians in a faint wash of violet. "Bitch was going to blow us high and dry."

  One last chance. She tilted her neck timing her moment—

  And lunged. Her bite missed most of his fingers, but she got the end of his pinky, felt a piece of his little finger against her tongue like gristle. He didn't let go, but his grip loosened. Not much, but enough.

  This time she made no mistake.

  The last thing she saw—after the horrified expressions, after the actinic flash, after the kicks of guns fired too late—was the All-Pervading Light.

  THE SCARECROW BY TOMAS L. MARTIN

  The Epirians are expert ship-builders, and many of the galaxy’s transports, cruise-ships and tunnelhuggers are made in a Foundation shipyard. Shipbuilding is often one of the first industries to spring up on a new world, harvesting the raw materials of the planet and star system to build spaceships that can resupply the world, bring new colonists and set out to scout new worlds. Robotics factories are installed hand-in-hand with the shipyards, and as a planet gets more established along the galactic trade routes, more and more of its industry is turned to robotic production. The Foundation encourages innovation, and new robotic designs are one of the best ways for a world to establish itself amongst the elite Epirian planets.

  Although advanced prototypes and expensive custom designed robots and vehicles are used by the Foundation’s rich, most of the Epirian robots are modular in design, so that parts can be reused and supply is easy. Central processing cores are designed so that a robot can be adapted to many roles, with only a small programmed chip needing to be changed to switch a mining robot to a soldier, or to convert a butler to a repair bot. Limbs, body parts, tools and weapons are all similarly made to be easily swapped and replaced. From a selection of parts, many different combinations of robots can be designed and built. This cuts down on the amount of material that is required to take a robotic team through space to a new world. Redundancy, reliability and adaptability typically takes precedence over more exotic designs.

  One of the most dangerous robots in an Epirian security force is the Scarecrow. Armed with a sni
per rifle and chemical dispersants, a single patrolling Scarecrow can defend huge swathes of Foundation land, as a Karist cell find out in this short story by Tomas L. Martin.

  +++Remote unit log, 10.14.206.27.15 Scanning... No target sighted. Unit in passive mode.+++

  "We've been watching the farm for four days," the acolyte said to the assembled cultists. "There's been no movement, no heat signatures, nothing."

  "You're sure?" The Kaddar Alessi said. Even though the priest was the group’s leader, he was young, and nervous. This was his first mission since his conversion that he'd been sent from the huge space Ark where he had trained to spread the word of the Fourteen, and bring more believers into the fold. This was his chance to impress the Kaddar Novrost, one of the highest priests in the order. When the Kaddar Novrost arrived on-board the Ark to take the world of Zycanthus and bring its inhabitants to ascension in the glory of the Maelstrom, the Kaddar Alessi wanted to be there to welcome them, with a new congregation waiting to join the Ark’s mission.

  "Nothing since the farmers went into the town," the acolyte said. He was a new recruit, local, ambitious. All four of the acolytes standing around him in the dark woodland were freshly converted, and from their demeanour the priest wasn't sure he'd won their loyalty entirely yet.

  "And the food?" The priest said. "How much is there?"

  "They finished harvesting for the season," the acolyte said. His face was mottled with the burns from his first cleansing, but the euphoria had passed. "But they haven't sold any yet. It's all there for the taking."

  The Kaddar Alessi nodded, and began his sermon. The acolytes clustered around him. This part of the world, far from the major Epirian Foundation cities, was poor and desperate, and the priest had already found many more open minds to the Word than his first failed attempt in the city where he’d landed. He’d been thrown into prison for a week for preaching on the streets, and threatened with beatings. People there didn’t seem to understand that he was trying to bring them to salvation. Here in the country, there were more people who understood what it meant to have faith.