‘Let’s just hope, that in the end, our greatest achievement isn’t nothing but an other Pyrrhic victory.’ Said Lauren.
Dusk rose to his feet, a sigh of unnerving presentiment escaped his lips.‘Nothing good come out of it, when the night equals the day.’
On spur of the moment the rooftop deck’s aircraft warning lights illuminated, hereafter, the nocturnal moths drawn to the heat, like wiggling electron particles spinning about their atomic nucleus endlessly, they were.
‘It’s going to be tough tonight,’said Hoyden, she came close to him, ‘it must’ve hit the ranges!’
‘Sounds bit rough,’ Dusk told her,‘I dunno, we’ve left the vernal equinox well behind us, March’s almost gone, sort of unlikely.’
‘I see, the equinox, I think you deserve this!’ she said as she undid the clasp on her sonnen finsternis amulet, an armlet of a winged solar eclipse, the metal circle with eight zigged rays inwards emitted; Hoyden twisted it twice into two halves. Dusk grasped the other half of the arm ring, of filigree bronze; he fastened it to the chain he wore. ‘The person who once made me the armlet, told me that one day its other half should be given to someone, the one I’ve admired the most in my life, one day when the equinox had occurred again.’
‘As firm as the bond of blood.’
Meanwhile, they hung on, submersed themselves athwart the haar-ish coastal fog, wanderers above a sea fog, that slithered enshrouding the conurbations.
She followed suit, as he jumped off the steel ladder mounted to one of those large air-conditioning units; few of the machines methodically gutted, now junk, had served the copper thieves. Along the lobby, they got in a double-deck elevator, struck the control panel’s buttons randomly, then not prior to the whooshing noise would they make sure it’d sunk bottomward, to wind down at the 26th, the hexed storey, the doors slided open. Toward apartment 826.
‘It’s dark, isn’t it? But it isn’t time, yet, is it?’called for an answer the half blind Madam Arenithe; when through her bright achromatic prosthetic eyeballs, implanted into her visual cortex, she detected in hyperspectral thermal imaging, two of her lodgers of the decade,‘I bet you won’t meet my expectations, tonight, either.’She went on mumbling; in the late seventies of age, that’s the norm. And in disagreement with negligible senescence, Arenithe’s ash gray hair had its eumelanin lost in a matter of a third century in the past, with vestiges of a bygone beauty branded her furrows, she raised eyebrows as people would say that, she must’ve been ravishing in her youth! While the non-congenital vision impairment she came to be victim to, had resulted in episodes of unipolar disorder; withal, Arenithe had the vibe to run a drug store, as a night shift pharmacist by choice, with the likelihood of worsening her chronic insomnia; she wasn’t all by herself there; the shop was a reliable income source during those days, though. Other than that, in her lab coat she so often dressed.
‘We won’t, but we’re just as close.’Returned Dusk, flat out giving Hoyden the wink, their shared intent.
‘Please, no games,’ Arenithe made the murmur, lowered her head as if took her nothing to catch him, just to start jabbering away,‘so it’s been, let’s say fifty-one hundred and twenty days since your lease, when the mortgage got signed with six hundred and eighty dollars a month, sum up a hundred and sixteen thousand and forty-eight unpaid bucks.’ She was sitting to a gateleg table doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, at intervals she nibbled at a dark chocolate bar, or sipped at a frothing cup of coffee, kopi luak, the pricey ritzy coffee beans made her daily hot cup of ambrosial exhilaration, of course she didn’t buy it in pounds as some would suggest, lest she’ll end up spending a fortune on what! The savoriest coffee in the world?! So what! Arenithe’d gotten her own methods in doing almost every single thing the way a Suabian housewife would; somewhere in her kitchen, was a cage, a medium-sized cage, in which she kept a pair of toddy cats, omnivorous little animals native to Southeast Asia, from where berries of the kopi luak were originally harvested, and so to the toddy cats in the wild fed, getting a digestive touch inside the animal’s stomach at the point in which zymotic chemistry takes place, only for the coffee beans oozing through the civets’ intestines to be later defecated, then the feces were sieved out, hence the processed coffee beans collected, roasted, and packaged; and that’s also how Arenithe the connoisseur house-made her select civet coffee.
‘Yikes, after all this time, same old things still, don’t have the foggiest idea nor a dime.’ Replied Hoyden.
‘Oh treasure, before you know it,’said the old woman, oddly enough, her cervical vertebrae maintained an equivalent degree of flexion,‘end justify the means…benign or not.’ She added.
‘Take into account,’ interrupting her, his voice tuned to imp disdain,‘adjustment for inflation rate, with respect to CPI at the base fifty-one hundred and twenty days ago, subtracted from CPI of present day at a hundred and thirty-seven, divided by the base year’s price, and multiplied by a hundred, counts you a bonus of thirty-seven per cent rise.’
‘Or we may otherwise,’told her Hoyden,‘carry you to the massifs and beyond, leave you where no twigs are there you can snatch, you’ll dehydrate and starve, till you die.’ Tongue in cheek.
‘Yadda, yadda—’ slurred Arenithe, struggled not to take seriously what she’d just heard, ‘mark my words, not even then you’ll get rid of me, in sake of the mazuma. It’s in the famine years of the Kamakura past, that this custom of ubasute, of elders like me being taken to godforsaken places by people they’d once adored, just to be left there to die, thrived more than the angels of death.’
‘No, you listen to me,’ Dusk blurted out, ‘three years, all I’m asking are three years from now, so I graduate, get a job, cozy salary, pay our student loans off, and repay you for the past seventeen years, multiplied by interest, even!’
‘Yea, yea, yea, I know you’ll do, I can see that chutzpah in your eyes!’ shrewed Arenithe averred, not looking at him in fact, ‘I see how apt you are to the tough work, how willing you are to slog away while every one else having the time of their lives, but sooner than later, it is you who will be living the day ten times as much as they ever did, while they will have to undergo the hardships of life ten times as much as you had.’
‘How does the half-blind see that without a lantern?’
‘Eyes are windows to the soul, aren’t they?’
Hitherto, the wall clock’d just marked the ebb of another troubled day. Arenithe stood to the bay window, its glass opaque, she gawked at the Northerner borough off range of the nacreous Juneauton; downward hub of the web, stood the telecommunication and observation tower, the Quartz. The Quartz amidst the geometric pattern of the boroughs, it was made centroid to three colossal obelisks, among the public known as the Solar Pillars; lofty platinum beams of whitish light demarcating the Juxtazone, raw iconic symbols; when the larch parks dispersed about their fringes, seemed to absorb the city luster.
And so they flanked to their foster-mother; outside, the blizzard had just begun.
‘It’s now.’
00:41 ante.meridiem, the infamous adhesive silence of the night dominated over the house; Dusk sealed off from the world in his room; Elgar’s Enigma Variations he listened to, at low decibels, reaching out; they were tedious processes reiterated for nights unfinished, the modus vivendi he’d coerced himself into; akin to the eternal return he believed in, and so did she; for that Hoyden too, was involved in the uncommon practice.
Under fluorescent tubes casting feeble black light that scattered through his irides, the grey irides. He laid down, his upper body exhibited before her, across his dorsum, underneath his skin, the ultraviolet-reactive ink glowed, nara black ingredients incorporated, and the extensive irezumi, the incomplete ouroboros tattoo was revealed, as she engraved the self-cannibalistic serpent on his flesh with two-coil iron; Hoyden was the artist.
‘At times, I’m really afraid.’ She told him.
‘Of?’
‘Spring, spring�
�s coming, that tomorrow or after, I’ll be kneeling to the altar, to oblivion.’ A gallows josh, the sort of humor circulated around the Zentrum.
‘Worry not,’ Dusk returned,‘you’re too charming for them to be chosen.’ Shamming insouciance, but inside, the perturbance he’d from the thought of Hoyden’s fate for the next five spring seasons, it alone was consuming him from inside. For the instance however, his words could draw a wry smile on her face.
By the occurrence of the Northward equinox marking every year’s eve, and until the coming of summer, on the summer solstice, those were special days for the young women of Juneauton. When the winter days were brought to an end, and the gauzy coating of March’s rime thawed down the eaves, fifty-one Maidens, girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, were singled out of each of the nine boroughs, with merely eighteen of them would endure as the prospective brides of nine Senior officers who had sworn the oath to the Ordo; it was all a mass wedding, the relic of a mad long tradition of racial miscegenation initiated through select polygamy, the practice verboten by law for every citizen of the boroughs to engage in, it strictly was exclusive to the Order Overseers Ordo aristocracy; they called the event, the Fount of Youth festivals.
Intermittently, resonant sirens of the cruisers patrolling the Northerner were heard; and Hoyden drowsed off on his bed, without bidding farewell to yesterday.
At the elevated floor, installed into the carbon fiber backbone of the wildold femme fatal, a bank of monitors went blank successively.
‘Trans1.4, search dead ahead to port quarter.’
‘Trans1.4, search dead ahead to port quarter. Stand by. Sound conditions poor, no escort carriers, no destroyers, clear all around.’
‘Trans1.1, make search 190 degrees, TRUE.’ Straight off, was the officer of the deck’s order. Lance Shteele, sub-lieutenant.
‘Notched up little progress yet.’ Reported she vaguely, Lauren, whose break had come to a brutal end; Lauren Rossuan, fitting a head-mounted display, less adopted to the strategist wizardry but as of fanatic, she was one of the four operators manning the sonar gears at the dimly lit command and countermeasure center, teaming up in this one room, was the Operation Dept. led by the Navigator, and the Combat Department overseen by the Weps, the weapons officer; anyhow, these two duties were not held separately, in effect, there was a one commanding officer.
‘I repeat,’ he said, getting nervous as hell,‘Trans1.1, search 190 degrees, TRUE. Lauren come on.’
‘What have I done to you?’ she deplored, she asked, then proceeded uttering low-pitched snigger.
‘No, shit, she’s drooling,’ blundered out Commander Sir Carl Hannigan, promptly leaving his position, toward the operator, who by now was convulsive; taking the HMD off her head, her eyes appeared to roll up, her teeth clenching, blacking out.‘Epileptic seizure, corpsman requested!’ Hannigan demanded out loud, and the other crew that’d been positioned under emergency lights, alarms in sequence, dealt with it in a state of enforced apathy, consenting to Protocol.9, regulating conduct aboard her, when from depths of the sea, to the hosting environment, something went wrong.
‘She’s epistaxis.’After examining her state on the spot, the Independent Duty petty officer 1st class Dr. Gaspare, told him,‘she’s got a history clear of seizures, I highly doubt it’s epilepsy.’Concernedly he added. And while Lauren was being transported on a scoop stretcher fading out; ‘whatever was that, make sure she’ll be dependable on in the next twelve hours, utmost.’Sir Hannigan made his point.
‘I’ll do her an electroencephalography, and if necessary gave her a high-dose.’ Precipitate, Hannigan, proceeded to adjunct himself in place to Lauren’s HMD, his futile attempt to substitute her for the deficiency her recondite reaction had caused.
‘Permission to relieve Trans1.1 operator.’ He requested.
‘Granted.’ Shteele returned.
‘Ready. Hannigan has the watch.’ He affirmed, currently, taking over relief to Lauren.
‘Your sector is 000 to 270. Hunter-killers reported.’ Shteele informed him; the man who had the conn at the control center, over the joint Combat Department and Operations’, the Navigator and Weps at the same shot; didn’t have access to a periscope, no eyepieces were there in the first place, nowhere around the sub to be found, the periscope was replaced with an optical holographic inertial navigation system, at the core of which was a pair of gyrocompasses. ‘Trans1.1, search 190 degrees, TRUE.’ Shteele added.
‘Trans1.1, search 190 degrees, TRUE. Retuning to 15 KHz.’ Hannigan acknowledged. The man full well agnized the machines he got himself plugged into, he’d gone through that before, in his beginnings as a warrant officer. Today, Sir Carl Hannigan, the commanding officer over her conflicting departments from the stern to the bow, and part of the confined cadre of commanders within the org; there was a sole word to define his breed, stoic. He filled the bill. Now, doing one of his subordinates’ job, Hannigan operated the Trans1.1 gear. At the left armrest periphery of his empowered seat was a duplex joystick, at the right, an input panel; the dual joystick worked as a training mechanism, either to hoist or lower the Trans1.1 projector, housed within a cabinet-sized orb of transducer arrays, it was mounted on a shaft affixed to bottom of the bow, thusly in active transmission, the shaft drove the projector to extend through the keel into water; the transducers, being an array of hydrophones themselves, they functioned as an active/passive set of sensors, designed to convert the sound waves emanating from the surrounding sources to electrical signals at passive reception; while in active transmission, they emitted pulses of sound as altered electrical signals, toward picking up contacts. In proportion to the dual control column, the sonar operator used a helmet mounted display, the HMD integrating built-in receiver-amplifier technology, interlinked with headphones that converted the electrical signals back into sound, it had the capacity to provide the sonar operator with sonic and supersonic listening, simultaneous to graphic input of the sonar scan, in the form of virtual bearing indicators, imposed onto the micro-display visor of the helm, which ultimately would correlate the detected contact’s behavior to a particular range, speed, or course; so to achieve such level of audio/visual coordination, deft handling of the data input panel was critical, keystroke mistaken, and the cost would be something more than a simple glitch. Hannigan carried on his report, ‘doubtful contacts, four utmost, hunter-killers squadron, sound nothing like I’ve heard before, this is not your typical fast-attack type, bearing 190, TRUE.’
‘I appreciate it commander.’ Shteele responded, in an attempt to shed his nervousness at the presence of his master; for before anybody else, it was Sir Carl Hannigan’s responsibility to build up the crew, best of the best, only those with the healthiest hold of character, and superior forte of intelligence, were eligible for enlistment. ‘Now, Trans1.1, pick up target bearing 270. Belay that. Pick up target bearing 315.’
‘Trans1.1, pick up target bearing 315,’ was the commander’s acknowledgment, turning a deaf ear to Shteele’s slip-up; adjusting the acoustic frequency switches input device, Hannigan kept on the report,‘target bearing 120, approaching starboard quarter. 140 degrees, propellers speeding up. 220 degrees, drawing aft. Target 195 degrees, short scale, turn count making 35 NMPH approx., straightaway on us. What do you say conde? You’re the commanding officer now!’
This is it, the best adrenal glands’ stimuli, Shteele told himself, in arguing his own. This was the case when the Orion became the hunted, the killer pests chasing them made the exception, and they seldom had experienced a similar abrupt shift in events; but in the times of trial, that Shteele, Lance Shteele convinced everyone of his true mould, he proceeded to give his order, ‘Trans1.3, launch the towed array, give me a mark on bearing 195.’
‘Trans1.3, launching the towed array, we need to slow down, mark on bearing 195, wait.’ Confirmed the third sonarman, casting the towed sonar, passive array; attached onto tail of the cable trailed at miles away, covering her blind spot, it perfect
ly caught motion of the enemy striking from behind. ‘Mark on bearing 190, we’re in their fire range. Turn count at 36 knots approx., 36.5, 37.5, 38, keeping on 38, distance yet decreasing at 12500 yards, 11200, 8900.’
‘Call the maneuvering room, auxil turbines be powered.’ He demanded.
‘Maneuvering, answer bells on auxil turbines.’ The talker at the command and countermeasure station circuit, repeated over the battle phone.
‘Maneuvering, answering bells on auxil turbines.’ At reception of the message, the throttleman opened the valves for more steam through the engine turbines. ‘Command and countermeasure, auxil turbines powered.’ The guys at the maneuvering, reported back.
‘Pilot1.1, change of course, ease your rudder 20-degree left. Adjust depth, tip on stern planes 15-degree down. No killer known to us withstands this much of pressure differentials, their resistance must crumble!’ Shteele told the helmsman;‘pilot1.2, ahead standard, increase speed by 5 knots.’ Directing his command to the co-pilot; positioned at the fore end of the control center; rotating the steering yokes, the helmsmen conducted her course either vertically, or in a back-forth procession.
‘Pilot1.1, change of course, rudder 20-degree left. Adjusting depth, stern planes 15-degree down, done.’
‘Pilot1.2, steady ahead, standard speed 37 knots, making turns for 42 knots, done.’ Co-pilot reported, ‘current speed, 42 NMPH.’
‘Very well.’ And what now? What after all? he tentatively, thought to himself, as they all kicked their heels for his next order, decisively, he then collected his dissipating nerve, and sighing said, ‘let us put an end to this, shall we? Tracking party, get to their stations…’
The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Page 2