by Josh Leone
“Greetings to you, young one.” Despite the significant mechanical differences between the vocal structure of a Pash and that of a human, the Pash spoke PS (Primacy Standard) with surprisingly little accent. “What brings you here this fine day?”
“I am here to collect an artifact said to be kept in this place.”
“What artifact would that be?”
“It is called Olim-Ojim in the Pash language. Is it here?”
“Indeed it is, young one”
“Then stand aside and I will collect it and be on my way.”
The Pash did not smile, its face was not designed to do so. But there was that in its eyes and in the twitch of its ears that indicated a gentle mirth.
“I cannot do what you ask, young one.”
“You would force my hand then?”
“I force nothing. You are free to choose your path.”
Jonah was growing frustrated with the cryptic alien. “You are wrong. I have a mission given me by a representative of the Holy Mother Earth Herself. I will not be deterred.”
“Then such is your chosen path. It would be better if you reconsidered, but sometimes wisdom is elusive and must be gained through experience.”
“I have no desire to hurt you.” Jonah truly did not want to harm the Pash, but it appeared he was being given no choice. Jonah accessed his combat protocols, selecting skill sets that would result in a minimum of injury to his opponent.
“Do not fear, young one,” said the Pash. “You will not.”
Jonah surged forward, his body following a calculated course. The Pash did not move. Jonah jigged to one side, throwing a straight punch with just enough force to knock the Pash unconscious. Or rather it would have done so, had the Pash not moved out of the way with the grace of liquid mercury. Jonah recovered quickly, spinning around and sending his foot at the Pash’s new position. But once again the Pash was not where expected.
Jonah moved away from the Pash to give himself a chance to reassess the situation. Clearly the Pash had advanced training. Jonah added that information to his calculation and received a new set of combat probabilities. Implanted micro-factories began discharging swarms of nanites throughout Jonah’s body. Some were specialized medics that would deal with injuries. Others held doses of various supplements at the ready to provide increases in strength, speed, and stamina. All of this occurred in less than a second.
Jonah did not want to kill the Pash but he was seeing little choice if the alien continued to resist. There would be no repercussions for killing the Pash, but that was not Jonah’s primary consideration. He had never killed before, except in VR simulations. But although the simulations had been as functionally real as if he’d been spilling real blood on a real battlefield, there was a psychological element that distinguished training from the real thing.
“Why is the Olim-Ojim important to you, Jonah Haj?”
“It is my mission.” Jonah wondered how the Pash knew his name.
“But why is that important to you?”
“Because…,” Jonah hesitated. “Because it is my purpose! I serve the Holy Mother.”
Jonah struck again, this time at full, lethal speed. Again he missed, his fist connecting with the volcanic glass of the temple, sending fractures outward from the point of impact. Nanites deployed to repair minor damage to his hand.
“You act without knowing why because you’ve been taught that it is wrong to question.”
Jonah accelerated his attacks, sending combinations of strikes at the Pash faster than un-enhanced eyes could see. The Pash dodged most, and swatted the rest aside with ease. No matter how Jonah attacked, the Pash was unaffected.
Jonah backed off again. Keeping his eyes on the Pash, Jonah accessed his tech to analyze how the alien was defending against him, seemingly without effort. The solution the tech returned made no sense. The Pash was defending before Jonah struck. Milliseconds before Jonah began to move, the Pash was already bringing an appropriate response into play. This meant that no matter how fast Jonah’s enhanced body could move, the Pash would always appear to be faster.
“How are you doing this?”
“Practice, Jonah Haj. Would you like to learn?”
“You dare suggest that you could instruct me?” Jonah’s anger was rising. The Pash was making a fool of him, stopping him from completing his mission. That could not be allowed to stand. Jonah was one of the Honored Returned, one of the chosen warriors of the Holy Mother Earth!
Jonah activated his armor, feeling it swarm across his flesh. His hand tingled as he summoned his linkblade, the energy weapon casting strange shadows across the barren landscape. The blade was less well defined than it had been in practice, a reflection of Jonah’s growing frustration.
The Pash remained calm in the face of this escalation. Jonah attacked with maximum speed, the linkblade missing the Pash by just a few centimeters on every strike. Jonah grew less and less in control of his anger as the Pash easily avoided the attacks. Each time Jonah attacked the Pash was already moving out of the way.
“Jonah Haj, this conflict is without reason. I am not your enemy.”
But Jonah was no longer listening. His anger had taken over entirely. He hated the feline creature that made him look the fool. He hated all of them, every single one of the despicable non-humans! He wanted the Pash dead. Nothing else mattered. Only when Jonah’s linkblade stuck in something did he gain a modicum of control again.
What replaced his anger was confusion. The linkblade, as a construct of pure energy, could not become stuck, not in anything. Yet it was. No matter how much strength Jonah employed, he could not move the blade, not a bit. Jonah’s tech glitched slightly when he saw how the weapon was stuck. The Pash was holding the blade in place with a single six-fingered hand.
His tech informed Jonah in a matter of fact manner that what he was seeing was not happening, that it could not be happening. The computer analyzed the scene and had determined, based on what it knew of the fundamental laws of physics, that a linkblade could not be held in such a fashion. Ergo, it was not happening. Yet Jonah could not deny his senses. The Pash was holding in its bare hand what, in essence, was a portion of Jonah’s own life force, and was doing so with as little effort as it had expended dealing with every other of Jonah’s attacks. Then, as if merely holding the blade in its unprotected hand wasn’t enough to make its point, the Pash squeezed.
Like most people, Jonah believed he’d felt pain - the pain of injury, the pain of loss, the pain of falling short of one’s own expectations. But he’d been wrong. He’d been more wrong about that than he would have thought himself capable of being about anything. The pain he felt when the Pash compressed the blade hit Jonah in every cell of his body. It was beyond anything his neurotech could manage, which, given that he was supposed to have total control over his body’s pain receptors, was yet another impossible thing. Jonah tried to disperse the blade, take away the source of the pain, but this he also could not do. Jonah might have identified this as still another impossible thing, but the pain filled Jonah’s mind, all corners of it, pushing out all other thoughts.
‘See the truth of things, Jonah Haj.’ The pain was gone as though a switch had been thrown. But Jonah was still held immobile. The Pash’s voice echoed through his mind.
The linkblade became a conduit between Jonah and the Pash. Jonah felt what the Pash felt – grief, regret, and crushing loss. Then came images, and they told a story. It was like being in VRS. There was more than just visual input. All five senses were engaged in the vision resolving itself around him.
It wasn’t any place Jonah recognized. It certainly wasn’t P30-6. There was a vast city made up of towers hundreds of stories tall. It looked like a forest. Thousands of arching bridges connected each tower to every surrounding tower like branches between trees. Pash in uncountable numbers glided gracefully from tower to tower, bridge to bridge. Predictable updrafts were provided by ground-based blowers to aid the Pash in gliding.
; The entire city was built in a ring around a central hub. The hub was a park more than three kilometers in diameter in the exact center of which was a massive black dome easily half a kilometer in diameter. The four-sided central spire was two hundred meters to a side.
Jonah walked toward the dome’s entry hall. The massive double doors were open to the air. Most of the Pash in the park appeared to be engaged either in various forms of solo or group meditation, or in lively, though respectful, philosophical debate. None of the Pash noticed Jonah.
‘This is not your time, Jonah Haj. This place ceased to exist anywhere but in my mind ages ago.’
Jonah passed the entry doors into the hallway leading into the dome. The hall continued in a straight line with side tunnels leading off at regular intervals. The hall was decorated in pictographs, some sort of precursor to the modern Pash language. Jonah did not understand the ancient drawings, yet he sensed that the symbols were religious in nature.
‘Yes.’ The thought-voice of his guide informed him. ‘Your instincts are correct. This was a place of great spiritual importance to my people.’
The entry hall gave way to an open chamber, massive in scale and circular in shape. Hundreds of Pash priests stood praying, wings spread, hands held out with palms up, whispering words in the hissing language of their species, creating a sonic wave that rose and fell like a tide and could be felt in one’s bones. But it was what stood in the center of the chamber that froze Jonah’s soul. Everything Jonah had been taught, everything he knew to be true in the deepest parts of his soul, was suddenly ripped away by what stood in the center of the temple, for there could be no more doubt as to the nature of the domed structure.
The Calling Tower soared up from the floor of the temple, reaching beyond its ceiling into the protective spire that had been built around it. Not Jonah’s Calling Tower, but a Pash tower. The entirety of the Primacy philosophy was predicated upon the fact that there was only one Calling Tower, only one species so blessed. Yet here before Jonah stood proof of the wrongness of that fundamental fact. Jonah fell to his knees, tears coming to his eyes.
‘Yes, my brother. Now you see the truth.’ There was sorrow in his guide’s thought-voice. ‘You must continue to watch. There is more you must see.’
There were structures around the base of the Pash tower. The structures had been made to look like natural stone, but Jonah knew without knowing how that they were actually complex machines made to look natural. In fact much of the temple was like that, highly advanced technology, even more so than that of the Primacy, made to look natural. Such was the Pash aesthetic, even into modern times.
The machine nearest the tower had the appearance of a large arch covered in carvings, some of which glowed with a subtle light. The arch was two meters thick, three meters wide, and four meters tall. It was positioned so that it pressed seamlessly up against the base of the Pash tower. The interior of the arch was filled with some kind of energy held in place by a force field. On either side of the arch, priests manned the control pillars.
In front of the arch there was a ten meter length of lush, natural grass, laid out like a carpet for a visiting dignitary. On either side of the grass path fourteen priests stood with outstretched wings and hands. A young acolyte was brought in, a slim boy only just having reached maturity.
The acolyte stepped onto the grass path, kneeled down in supplication, and spread his wings as wide as he could. Two of the priests standing closest to the tower folded their wings and took one step out of line, then turned to face the kneeling acolyte.
Without a word the acolyte folded his wings, stood up, and began walking in slow and measured steps toward the arch. When he was within a couple meters of the giant crystal the acolyte allowed his robe to be untied and removed, leaving him naked before the tower.
The priests at the sides of the arch worked the controls and the energy within the structure began pulsing like a heartbeat. Jonah’s soul felt the beat and his own heart beat in sympathetic rhythm.
The acolyte stepped into the arch and was consumed by the wild energies within. The priests continued to chant, their whispers growing in volume. The purplish light of the Pash Calling Tower intensified as the chanting increased. Jonah watched, fascinated by the alien, yet somehow familiar scene unfolding before his eyes. Time became distorted and Jonah could not have said if it had been minutes or hours since the Pash acolyte had entered the tower.
A hand emerged from the arch. The hand appeared to be made of amethyst light. The acolyte, so Jonah assumed, though it was impossible to tell as the being seemed made of energy, emerged fully from the archway. It had the form of a Pash, though one of unusually large stature.
As Jonah watched, the being of light raised glowing arms and extended glowing wings. The purple light faded, the figure becoming more substantial. Finally, after another indeterminate span of time, a fully formed Pash stood before the tower. Jonah recognized the alien immediately as the very same Pash that had bested him in front of the temple on P30-6.
‘Yes,’ the mind voice said. ‘This was my Making. What you call ‘Returning.’ We are brothers, Jonah Haj. Though the method may vary, we are born of the same power.’
The vision broke apart, leaving Jonah back in reality, or so he supposed. Jonah was still on his knees exactly where he’d been when the vision began. The Pash had let go of the linkblade and the weapon had dissipated. Jonah stayed where he was, not because he was held in place, but because he could not summon the will to stand. His reality, the basis upon which he’d lived his entire life, had been shattered. That what he’d seen was true, Jonah did not doubt. He wished he could believe otherwise.
“The Earth is divine. The Calling Tower is the power of the Holy Mother made manifest,” said Jonah, though even to his own ears it sounded more like a plea than a statement of fact.
The Pash warrior knelt down in front of Jonah. “Indeed it is, my brother. All life is divine. All worlds that support life are holy. But there are many forms of life, and many worlds where it can be found in abundance.”
“How can they all have towers?”
“Some do not. I myself know of only two, one on your world and one on my own. Though I think it likely there have been others. The towers are not gifts; they are tests.”
“I don’t understand.” Jonah finally looked up into the eyes of the Pash, eyes full of empathy despite their alien appearance. “How is the Calling Tower a test?”
“Come, my brother. I will tell you of my people and of the tragedy we brought upon ourselves, a tragedy that your people may yet avoid.”
Chapter 6
In the days following the death of the old world, in the time of strife, She was a light in the darkness.
-Book of Gifts (1-9)
The Starlight docked with border station 1212 after receiving clearance. It had cost Sha significant credits to have a professional reprogram the ship’s transponder to broadcast a forged registry code. Fortunately Sha had been able to liquidate much of his personal savings before his accounts had been frozen.
Station 1212 was far from Earth, far from the core of the Primacy, far, in point of fact, from just about everything. The station was on the border between Primacy controlled space and a vast expanse of dark space, a region without stars that had never been officially claimed by any species. For that reason Legion patrols were thin and only a few hundred permanent stations populated the region.
But while 1212 was remote, it was also very well armed. Long range, phase-capable drones could strike out at anything within several light-years of the station with enough force to devastate a large ship or a small fleet. For short range defense the station possessed an array of plasma cannons and missile batteries. But while 1212’s armaments were effective for their purposes, they were all somewhat out of date, just like the station’s computer. This, in large part, is what made it possible for Sha’s forged transponder codes to trick the system.
There were many other ships connected to the ou
ter edge of 1212’s primary docking ring. Most were older models but Sha knew enough to be wary of them all. The latest engines and weapons could be hidden within a hull that looked ancient. Many freelancers preferred to disguise their ships as harmless looking junkers. Better for avoiding unwanted attention.
Unfortunately this meant that the Starlight, sleek and new, stood out like a sore thumb. Sha could have purchased another ship, one that did not look quite so impressive, but given that speed and reliability would soon be of critical importance to him, Sha elected to stay with the ship he knew. After docking, Sha made his way to the office of the station commander, a man by the name of Jarvik Renson.
Renson had only just recently been promoted and assigned to 1212. Sha had checked Renson’s record and found that the man had been fast-tracked into his new rank and position. On first glance being made commander of a distant border station hardly seemed like an enviable position. But when one considered that a person in such a position was, in essence, the final word in all things involving their assigned domain, it became clear that the job would appeal to certain people.
Station commanders this far out were basically kings and queens of their own private kingdoms. Primacy citizens were unlikely to venture so far, and even if they were of a mind to make such a long journey away from the comforts of home, there was no reason to come to 1212. The only beings that came to 1212 were freelancers, rogues, and Legion personnel who’d managed to piss off someone with authority. Renson’s power over them was nearly absolute. As long as regular reports were filed, Renson could do anything he wanted. The assignment was perfect for someone desiring power without having to work for it. According to his psych profile, Jarvik Renson was precisely that sort of person.
Sha was not accustomed to being made to wait. As an Honored Returned, Sha was generally given high priority in all things. It had never occurred to him that he might actually miss that. Perhaps he was not as humble as he’d thought himself to be. Pietra would have laughed at that. He could almost hear her gentle admonishment. ‘It’s easy to be humble when everyone adores you.’