The Sunseed Saga

by Brett Bam

  Chapter 15

  Dalys

  22 days before the flare

  “This is Skipper Ronid Jabesh of the Patrol ship Otherc acknowledging your mayday call.”

  The announcement caused a cheer on the RHS.

  “Captain Jabesh, this is Captain Dalys Xristian of the Ribbontail, hail acknowledged. Thanks for coming, we need a little help.”

  “I can see that from here. It looks like you've been in a fight, Captain. What happened?”

  “We are a free trader registered with the Community of Man performing standard water boosts from Luna and Earth. We were docked on Earth Harbour when all hell broke loose. We sustained a little damage on the way out of there. It was a nightmare Captain.”

  “I’ve seen some of the footage. News of the disaster is all over the net. Do you have any casualties?”

  “We lost a crewmember, but everyone else is fine.”

  “I'm dreadfully sorry for your loss Captain.”

  “Thank you for your kindness Captain. We do have some thrust available, although it'll take us weeks to get to the nearest outpost. We sure could use a tow.”

  Chapter 16

  Kulen De Sol

  Once again, I am immersed in liquid, wrapped in a machine. But this time I am not restrained. This blue liquid does not penetrate me, it holds me, comforts me, heals me. There is a peace here that reminds me of the brief safety of my father’s arms. My body is hurt. Cut and bruised and torn. It is a massive source of pain and so I want to dislocate it from me. I feel the wind unravelling, that ever-present wind that blows wildly about me in the real without affecting anything in the physical. It blows and pulls at me, I watch as it curls and spins in small eddies of disturbed current around a thread that connects my self to my body. I feel the thread between my self and my body stretch and extend willingly as I…

  I step away from my body leaving its limitations, failures and pain behind. There is no otherplace here in the physicality of this world. There is no Protocol. I am so far away from that place now that all I can see is an endless black void in the real and the physical places around me, a vast nothingness as far as I can perceive.

  Freedom. Immersed in liquid and wrapped in machinery again, I have found freedom.

  And then, separated by the frailness of the physical, my mind begins to quicken and

  I turn my attention to the machine that enfolds me. It is interesting to my mind’s eye. I can see the power flowing through the deck along conduits of wiring. The conduits lead to a power source which glows and sparkles prettily as it spins. The power source feeds other machines, many of them, simple things all working in concert to a purpose. The power trapped in the steel is a small fragment of that which is within me, but constricted, imprisoned, controlled. This power is a tame one which serves the metal it runs through. I let my awareness drift over the machine and slowly come to realise that it is a tiny finite world I am in. It is a vessel of some kind, there is a metal skin and then nothing. Simply nothing outside of my reach. I look outward into the nothingness, terrified but curious, and I see the stars. There are millions of light sources out there. Some bright and roaring, others soft and flickering. We are moving at a fantastic rate through a great void. The ship is moving relative to the millions of light sources so far away. I can hear the machine that drives us; it screams its energies into the void, it thrusts us along. This is a ship to travel through space and it is taking me away from Earth.

  Also, I am not alone. There are others here, people, like my father and like me, human.

  I can sense them, five of them scattered about the ship, each one a slow swirl of emotions and thoughts, and fragrant hormones. Their thoughts are exclusively separate and their auras do not mingle.

  They are not like my father and I. These people have no perception of the real; they wander through the wind with blissful ignorance of its existence. They are blind, stumbling about their reality. They cannot perceive a tenth of the things I can, not without all the machinery that encases us, not without physical tools to aid them. Their minds are sluggish and slow, thoughts take a long time to congregate and the nerve impulses spearing through their bodies is half again as slow as my own. Their auras are all different and as I search them out I recognise one in particular, the woman who saved me when my father... died.

  If she is near then I am safe. She has the keys of liberty and freedom in her hands. I am most interested in her. I watch carefully. She is beautiful in her own way, her body is lean and strong and her mind fresh and crisp but slow, so slow. She moves slowly but sparkles with determination. It makes me feel safe and cared for.

  Then the wind tugs at me again, like an insistent friend keen to play. I surrender to it and drift through the ship. I fly along with the wind following the tenuous glow of the thread and easily…

  Find my way back to my body.

  I rest my head back into the healing liquid and surrender myself to peace, and to my dreams. My dreams have become a special place. The great wind that does my bidding in the otherplace is the key to a great store of remembered things which I only glimpse in increments. The wind blows through my dreams, and while my broken and pain-filled body heals and grows, I can watch that flow of information, taking in snippets here and snippets there. And so I learn as I sleep, I learn and I heal. My dreams are lucid states of reality, awareness disconnected from the physical. My dreams are timeless images of past and present, fractures of the collage I saw in the Protocol’s otherplace - that remembered torrent, that fabric of screams. Here the dreams follow my whim, not that of a vengeful, scrabbling, panic-stricken multitude. The wind here in this real place shows me what I want to see, allows me to learn things that will help me, such as the languages I need to speak to these people and the mannerisms with which they behave. My mind is free to use the fabric, to still the memories of the screams and learn to hear them, to quiet them and listen to them one at a time. To hear what they say. The knowledge is mine. Mine alone, for the Protocol cannot hear me here.

  Curtis leaned over the still form of the boy in the nutrient bath and ran her scanner over him. His cuts were healing amazingly well, and most of the bruises had almost disappeared. His bones were all knitting satisfactorily. She'd never seen anyone respond this well to the nutrient bath before; he'd only been in it for two days.

  She was amazed by this little miracle in front of her. He was beautiful. Berea would have loved him. Sadness at the thought flitted through her, causing her to flinch as it always did. The trauma was so sharp and toxic. When it appeared, it came fast and terrifying, like a knife across her soul. She was afraid of the pain and was always relieved when it retreated and allowed her some comfort. She knew the day would come when she had to face that grief, but it wouldn’t be today. She just wasn’t ready for something like that. The dregs of the emotion drained away, leaving her feeling tired and sad. She sighed.

  Kulen stirred in the bath and she leaned forward intently. The boy’s left hand rose slowly out of the bath and touched her on the cheek. His eyes opened and Curtis saw they were the most intense hazel she'd ever seen.

  “Berea,” he said in his small voice. Then he blinked rapidly and looked like he was struggling to stay awake, a battle he lost. Curtis lowered the frail hand in hers into the bath, placing it carefully. Then she leaned back and put both hands to her mouth. She was still like that, sitting there awkwardly, trying to make sense of what had just happened, when Dalys walked into the med bay.

  “Are you okay Curtis?”

  The doctor yelped and jumped, startled at her voice. “Dalys! Yes, I'm fine. He just…” the words caught in her throat. He just what? Read her mind? Felt her thoughts? “I’m just feeling a little introspective at the moment. You caught me.” She quickly wiped away the brimming tears and took a breath.

  “You're sure? I could always come back later, unless you'd like to talk about it.” Dalys waited at the dilated portal, respecting the space as Curtis’ private domain.

  “Oh,
its just that, well you know, Berea....” She faltered, scared again. She turned and looked at Kulen but he was asleep and the bath was still. The thick gel left no trace of his movement. Had she imagined it? “Anyway, don't worry about me I'm fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Right, well... we’re getting closer to Gamaridia. I thought I'd come find out about our little refugee. How is he?”

  “Actually, I'm glad you came down here. There are definitely a few things you need to know about this boy.”

  “That sounds ominous, what is it?”

  Dalys came fully into the room while Curtis called up the chart of her examination. A holo of the sleeping boy sprang up over the console and Curtis manipulated the graphic, which shifted and slid under her touch.

  “First of all, he's only two years old.”

  Dalys spoke softly. “How is that possible?”

  “I'm not sure, for all I know he might be a clone, who knows what those bastards on Earth did to him? His bone structure is immensely strong, more elastic than normal bone; his musculature is growing rapidly, he's three centimetres taller than when he first came aboard. There’s some kind of interference, like a hiss of static, and I think it’s coming straight from him or that thing on his hand. My instruments read some sort of huge bioelectrical aura that surrounds him. There are signals of brain activity in his head that are weirder than anything I’ve ever seen and there are regions of his brain that are active beyond any other recorded activity. I would like to show you a comparison, by scanning your brain activity and then scanning his.”

  Dalys frowned. “What sort of scan are you talking about?”

  Curtis looked resigned as she said, “MRI and CT, and I'd like to do a PET too, but you'll have to take a little chemical tracer injection.”

  “Okay, if you say it's important enough.”

  “It will certainly illustrate my point.” Dalys sat in a chair and allowed Curtis to put a small sticky pad on her temple. The spot went cold and then numb and Dalys tasted something chemical in the back of her throat. Curtis pointed a hand-held laser into her face and said,

  “Close your eyes.”

  Dalys complied and Curtis pulled the trigger. The light bathed Dalys’ face and started to flicker, planting grids across her features and zeroing in on her eyes and ears. They stayed motionless for three seconds before the gun beeped and flashed green.

  “Okay, good.” said Curtis. She tapped her display and the hologram showed an image of Dalys’ brain. Electrical activity flickered in it, flashing like rainbows as the diagnostic read the information.

  “This is a very normal brain pattern. Mine looks very much the same.”

  She flicked through the images again and showed them a recorded image of her own brain scan. As promised, it was very similar.

  “It changes when we sleep. The patterns and the activity diminish and alter. New areas come into play. Every brain is slightly different.” She paused and looked at Dalys, gauging her reaction to the impending news. “I want you to remember one thing before I show this to you. Right now Kulen is asleep, so this pattern will be brighter when he's awake.”

  Curtis slipped her hands through the hologram and it zoomed in and focused on Kulen’s head, then the skin, hair and tissue dissolved into muscle and bone and the image was of a brain. It seemed bright and white, detail was obscured. The longer the image focused on the sleeping child's brain the brighter the image got, until it was shining to brightly to make out anything but a light.

  “When he sleeps his brain scans light up like fireworks. Also, he's healing too fast. And I think he's got some sort of empathic or intuitive ability to feel our emotions, although the only proof I have of that is an unrecorded incident which really freaked me out and is why I was so flustered when you came in. What's going on here Dalys?”

  “You know, a lot of people are asking me that as if I knew the answer. How long is he going to be asleep?”

  “He’s out for as long as we want him to be. I’ve got him dosed up to help the healing process. Not that it needs much help in this case.”

  He looked so frail and helpless, that long hair drifting in the liquid, a peaceful expression softening his face. He was such an intense boy, such a mystery.

  Dalys was less shocked at the mystery of his birth than Curtis thought she was. She'd fought the Korporatsie after all, a race that bred its own genetic castes for mining and war. She’d seen the horror herself. If this boy had been cloned or bred on Earth as part of some experiment, then the depth of his trauma was more profound than she had thought. She couldn’t give him back to them, no matter what.

  “I am so sick of this. I am so sick of all the death and destruction in this life. Everywhere I go I have had to fight people trying to kill me and the people I love. One of the reasons I’m still flying this bucket of bolts is because I don’t want to go back to the war, yet I can’t keep it away. It follows me. Death follows me. They nearly killed us all Curtis. They killed Berea. They tried to kill this boy, this boy! None of it is his fault! He’s just a boy. He didn’t ask for any of this to happen. He’s a victim, more so than any of us. We chose to be where we are doing what we’re doing. He didn’t ask for anything! They killed his father in front of him, and who knows what the hellfire happened to him before I found him. All I see in front of me is a small boy with nowhere to go and nobody to help him. He's hurt, alone, afraid and the last act of his murdered father was to deliver him into my hands. I'm not going to abandon him now.”

  Curtis put a hand on Dalys’ shoulder in a gesture of comfort. “What are we going to do with him Dalys?”

  “Make sure he’s not in any pain for starters.”

  “And then?”

  Dalys sighed. “I’m not sure. We can’t keep him here. He’ll get refugee status and the Community of Man will foster him somewhere. Although that’s only assuming they don’t cut that thing off his hand first.”

  “And what authority should have him? Will you give him to the People’s Pope? Will the Rommel Corporation take him? The Korporatsie? Will you give him to your King?” Anger sharpened her voice and Dalys sighed. She held her hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “Doc, you’re asking me questions I have no answer to.”

  “He needs help Dalys.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly, but what makes you think that we’re the right people to help him? He needs someone he can talk to about what’s happened to him and the things he’s seen. If he really is the victim of some sort of renegade Protocol experiment then the government needs to be alerted that such things are happening. This might not be our call. And don’t forget the Protocol is hunting him and that thing on his hand. He’s dangerous Curtis.”

  “He’s just a little boy Dalys.”

  Dalys put her hands on the side of the bath and hung her head. “I know that, but they nearly killed all of us to get him back. They nearly destroyed this ship.”

  “You can’t just abandon him the first chance you get.”

  “I already lost Berea, I won’t put us all at risk again.” She looked at Curtis. “But I won’t abandon him, even though I think he needs more help than we can provide.”

  Curtis was silent for a moment. “What are we going to do then?”

  “The first order of business is to stay alive long enough to fix this bucket. Don’t worry. I’m glad you’re angry about this. I can use anger, it can be a motivating emotion sometimes.” She turned to leave. “Let me know when he wakes up. I really want to speak to him.”

  Chapter 17

  Gamaridia

  10 days before the flare

  Gamaridia, the primary asteroid of the Gamaridian Group loomed bright and wide in the Ribbontail’s sensors. Dalys and the crew watched its inexorable approach with mixed and turbulent emotions. Gamaridia was tremendous. 49 kilometres long and 23 wide with the rough shape of a potato and the albedo of coal, it spun lazily in space, surrounded by smaller satellites of steel, plastic, glass and stone. Agricultural bubbles, mining complexe
s, pleasure spheres and security fortresses all drifted through space near the primary. The asteroid displayed a lazy spin as they approached, providing artificial gravity to the inhabitants while making the docking procedure somewhat complicated.

  After much debate, it had eventually been agreed that the Ribbontail would complete her approach under her own power. Dalys had to argue the matter with Captain Jabesh. If the Ribbontail was towed in to dock then the Otherc could make a claim of salvage and potentially gain ownership of the ship, or at the very least acquire a massive fee for the rights. So Dalys and the crew had worked very hard to satisfy both Captain Jabesh and the Gamaridian Docking Authority that the Ribbontail was fit to handle the final stages of approach. Their assigned trajectory led them straight down the docking spindle which rotated in the centre of the wide-open maw that was the endcap docking bay. It was a sharp maze of metal gantries, walkways, umbilicals and docking piers, all gnarled with magnetic clamps, control offices and maintenance depots which glittered under the harsh glare of a million floodlights and red and green blinking guidance beacons. It looked like a mouth filled with steel teeth and sparkling fire, littered with dark greasy corners. The Ribbontail coasted slowly towards the white glare of the central berths, where gravity was zero in the spin of the asteroid. Any of the deeper berths would force them to use too much thrust to brake, which, combined with matching the spin of the giant rock, might cause a large amount of damage as the weight of gravity was added to the stricken ship.