Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

by Fabio Fernandes

Perched on top of a tall bench, Long Teeth jumps over the opponent, knocking him over. The two of them get bogged down and, with the impact, they go rolling around. They reach a raised panel, which slopes and falls on them, causing an avalanche of equipment and consoles.

  In the midst of the fight, the son-of-the-night realizes that the armor of the enemy performs a frenetic—and pathetic—attempt to mimic the mutating chaotic patterns of the fallen wreckage around them. Maybe it could fool him, if he saw as badly as a human…

  Stunned, Jonas tries to throw punches and kicks at the opponent, but only manages to hit consoles and devices that fall around him and now lie as obstacles between the combatants.

  A cascade of noise in the midst of the collapse indicates that Enigma was able to rise from the debris of the panel about ten feet away.

  Jonas scours the confused environment in search of the entity and finds it nowhere. VIB activates the infrared sensors to plot the residual heat of the opponent. He follows the resulting trail with his gaze, but before he can locate the enemy, he hits him in the back, knocking him down again.

  Enraged, he turns his body and shoots the laser non-stop, setting fire to part of the debris of the equipment scattered on the floor.

  “You fool.” Jonas hears the accusatory grunt in Enigma’s ringing voice.

  When he finally infers the direction from which the affront came, the other is no longer there. Enigma is a master at this type of action. Jonas shakes his head, angry with his own stupidity. He must have centuries of experience…

  “Charge: less than 40%. Overload on the right hand thermolaser. Nanobot repairs in progress.”

  That was all that was missing! I need a new strategy…

  He stands in the midst of the flames. Does not start the fire. The clothing will protect him from the flames and their reserves of air will prevent him from suffocating with the smoke that surrounds them.

  When sweeping the smoky compartment with the IVs, he notices the sneaky approach of the entity and commits the attack. When he notices his opponent’s momentary loss of balance, he aims a punch in the face, but ends up striking his left shoulder. Enigma falls and disappears again in the smoke.

  Amazing! No matter how many times you knock him down, he’s always on his feet…

  At that moment, the compartment’s fire-fighting system decides it’s time to release dense jets of carbon dioxide over the main outbreaks.

  Distracted, Jonas does not notice the IVs in time as the car comes flying toward him. The motion sensor alerts him too late. The armchair Enigma throws knocks him down like a bowling pin.

  He rises, scared, and dodges another heavy armchair at the last moment, thrown against his head. A long metal rod emerges from the smoke and spins to strike from behind.

  “Generalized electrical pane in right leg micro-scanners. Repairs in progress.”

  Shit! Not now…

  He tries to rise, but the opponent hits him again with the massive shaft, now on the trunk. Gracelessly, he twirls his body to sneak behind a knocked-over bench, but Enigma anticipates the move and takes another blow on the head, and then another.

  Can’t get up. The failures mentioned by the VIB must be more serious than he thought. He sees the enemy emerging from the smoke. He no longer bears the metal club. In a leap, he crouches beside him and grabs him by the shoulder, while he raises his left arm with claws extended to deliver the coup de grace against his visor.

  Without alternative, he holds the forearm of the entity and releases the most powerful electric discharge that the suit is capable of producing.

  Long Teeth is cast away. Reaches the bulkhead at the opposite end of the lab and lands on the floor with a bang.

  Jonas struggles to lift his torso by leaning on his elbows. Through the cloud of smoke, he observes through the infrared the opponent’s inert body lying at the other end of the room.

  “Charge: less than 10%. Severe risk to content survival. Available resources allocated for emergency repairs.”

  Doesn’t matter. I beat him. Jonas rests his head on the floor covered with debris and fragments of battle. He breathes in while the VIB makes the necessary repairs. No one survives with roasted neurons. Not even Enigma… Comforted by that thought, he slips into unconsciousness.

  Then, seconds or hours later, he awakens to a moan of agony, like a hoarse meow, out of the depths of smoke and debris.

  No. It’s impossible… I must be dreaming…

  But the nightmare is real. The entity is crawling. First on his hands and knees, then on his knees, and finally standing up, walking hunched like an old man, but stronger and more whole with every step. Then, he stops in the middle of his stumbling advance towards the defenseless Brazilian.

  Jonas shakes his head in disbelief. His sensors must be crazy. Because he can swear that the half-destroyed suit of the other is smoking…

  “Enough of this.” Long Teeth huffs with clenched teeth. “I’ve wasted too much time on you.”

  The son-of-the-night draws a long, thin artifact from a thin pocket camouflaged on the side of his thigh. A stick or rod. He tilts his torso and spears the rod in the opponent’s chest. He closes his leathery eyelids to avoid the actinic glow emanating from the gun.

  “No…” Jonas exclaims without strength. “It will disable the VIB.”

  “That is the general idea.” Long Teeth displays a protruding canine smile. “I hate to appeal to such high-tech contraptions.” He slowly cuts a circle in the chest of the armor, being careful not to burn too much of the meat underneath the suit. “It’s a bit like cheating, but apparently I can’t pierce your armor with my claws.”

  When it’s over, the son-of-the-night removes the metal disc from his opponent’s armor. The glowing circle squeaks in contact with the palm of his hand. The Brazilian must have tremendous self-control because he doesn’t seem to feel pain. Just grief.

  “Please don’t do this.” Jonas’s helmet splits open, showing his reddened face and his teary blue eyes. “You don’t understand…”

  Fed up with the enemy’s whimpering, the son-of-the-night rips off his scorched glove and rests his palm on the Brazilian’s chest, half-free of armor.

  “Sleep now.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not working…” Long Teeth contemplates the enemy’s blue eyes. A short-life immune to Domination? Wait a minute… “You don’t feel anything, do you?” And here I am, taking damned care not to burn him…

  “I’m quadriplegic.” Jonas smiles weakly. “I imagine your legendary touch does not work on me.”

  The son-of-the-night frowns. For a moment, the Brazilian almost comes to regard him as human, intuiting traces of piety in the countenance of his victorious opponent.

  “I’m sorry.” Long Teeth nods gravely. “It will be the hard way, then. At least you will not feel pain.

  “How will it happen?”

  “Like this.” He sinks four sharp claws into the exposed chest of his son’s killer and only removes them when he confirms that the heart has stopped beating and the brain will not work again.

  Exhausted, he puts the plasma needle back in his pocket, standing up. A quadriplegic. Who would have thought… He still has a mission to fulfill in the São Paulo.

  9. Sabotage in the Anduro Complex

  He returned to the Caloji VIII and maneuvered the hybrid spacecraft away from the São Paulo.

  At last he managed to find Sharp Claws’s head in a safe installed in the late Cobalt Blue’s own cabin, easily located by the olfactory track of the Brazilian agent. Full of bitterness, he used the needle to disintegrate it. When escaping from the fortress, for the sake of his own safety, he thought it best to disable the batteries of his defensive surface.

  As soon as he left the São Paulo, the master program alerted him to encoded holing with absolute black priority.

  “Show it in the holotank.”

  The utterly black face of Negumbo floats life-size in the control cabin. Notwithstanding the phlegmatic
and proverbial self-control, he perceives in the semblance of the Ebony soba a subtle note of restrained irritation, mixed with a hint of disappointment.

  “Contrary to our explicit assertions, you invaded the orbital fortress of a friendly country, risking not only your own life, but also bringing about a diplomatic crisis of interplanetary proportions.”

  Friendly country? Long Teeth grins a cynical smile. If there is one thing he has learned from his long association with the Palmarine intelligence community, then, in an extremely meritocratic society like the First Republic, all’s well that ends well. What really matters is that he has managed to derive from the enemy vital biological knowledge about the nature of the True People. In addition, he verified the suspicion about the existence of the armored smart suits and developed an effective strategy to combat enemy operatives wearing those suits.

  “Immediately transfer command of the craft to the flight program transmitted on board during its absence. We regret to inform you that you will be judged by the Ebony. If found guilty, you must prepare to give up many of the privileges that you now enjoy in Palmares. Best regards.”

  Apparently, this time he was wrong.

  Fortunately, before leaving Earth, he made arrangements for such an eventuality.

  “Don’t enable this piloting package.”

  “The order to enable it has high priority.”

  “I strictly forbid this package. Absolute black. Confirm vocal pattern and retinal signature.”

  “Order confirmed. Previous order revoked.”

  “Excellent. Optimize positioning of the engines to reach the contingency target in the shortest possible time period. Add thrust of the conventional propulsion at maximum power and keep it until we surpass the lunar orbit.”

  “The selected destination lies far from the plane of the ecliptic and out of the holomap of the Solar System.”

  “Just follow the order.”

  “Understood. Executing.”

  Two hours later, Negumbo re-materializes in the control holotank. Now he makes no attempt to hide his irritation.

  “If you don’t start maneuvers to return to low orbit within the next fifteen minutes, we will render your ship unusable and then send back a special command to approach it. This is our first and last warning.”

  The Ebony soba goes off in a bright spot without a word of farewell.

  Long Teeth has already deduced what they will do.

  This time he won’t bow his head. Both he and Ebony went too far to turn back. If he could return to Earth without retaliation, he might reconsider. However, the way things have gone, he has no choice.

  The truth is that for decades he has had enough of this bondage to short-lives. It is possible that the fact that he is no longer the only son of the night wandering around the Mortal World has something to do with this feeling of annoyance.

  Therefore, in deciding to avenge his son’s unexpected death, he planned an emergency exit in case he had to face a threat of Ebony’s punishment. An exit that, if successful, will give him a long vacation.

  After more than three centuries of living with the Palmarines, it is not difficult for him to anticipate the strategy. After all, how to stop the escape of a spacecraft in full throttle, with the canopy fully unfurled? Simple: letting go of the sails. Palmares does not have warships or fortresses in the neighborhood. The treaties themselves for peaceful use of space signed by Brazilians and other short lives ensured that this was so. However, Palmares does not need plasma ships or batteries to knock down a spacecraft near orbit because it has the Anduro Station.

  Recently inaugurated in a circular orbit around the Sun, a fifth of Mercury’s average distance, the vast complex of solar-powered multilayer batteries has been severely criticized by other nations since the time when it was only a controversial project presented by Palmarine astro-engineers to the international scientific community at a symposium under the auspices of the UN.

  The First Republic asserted that it would never employ Anduro for military purposes. Although it can drive coherent beams concentrated for hundreds of millions of kilometers beyond the Solar System, the real purpose of the complex is to propel automatic probes of the solar gravitosphere to the nearest star systems in a considerable fraction of the speed of light. Automatic probes and, perhaps in the future, manned spacecraft in the form of large space sailboats.

  Like its past counterparts at the end of 2012, these early third millennium palmarine strategists think of everything and think big. Hence, despite solemn promises and legal safeguards, Anduro was prepared to act as a weapon. Not that there were plans to employ it as such. Just for an eventuality. Therefore, the same batteries capable of propelling the gigantic sails of a ship, continuously accelerating it to as many as a hundred or two hundred astronomical units away from the Sun, if employed in concentrated focus at point-blank range, so to speak, could perfectly destroy these sails.

  Anduro is well positioned for the masterstroke. The senior son-of-the-night would be given one more lesson. Of course, strategists would not resist the temptation to use the new toy in a show of strength through the Inner Solar System.

  Intuiting such facts, in the final favor of one of his best short-live friends, he managed to insert certain subtle instructions into the premises of artificial intelligence that Anduro manages.

  When Ebony managed to persuade the Palmares Space Command to use the station’s multi-stage batteries to stop the rebellious son-of-the-night’s escape, they operated promptly, but not as expected. The laser beams hit the Caloji’s sails with diffused focus, just as they had to do to accelerate it rather than cut off its wings. When the Anduro technicians attempted to clear the lasers, the manager revoked the order. Intrigued, the commander of the station determined the temporary deactivation of the systems housing the A.I. However, taken by Brazilian invaders, the technicians sent on that mission were put out of action by the defensive apparatus at the disposal of the manager.

  When a high speed accelerated Palmarine warship especially of the terrestrial orbit finally managed to dock in the Anduro and its crew resumed control of the situation, the Caloji VIII was already outside the destructive ray of action of the batteries and, in addition, it had already jumped out of the gravitosphere. Too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it.

  * * *

  “My ganga, why were agents Djogo and Uiara not punished in exemplary fashion?” Lumumba sighs, depressed at the starry splendor unveiled through the holographic lookout of the Amalamale orbital habitat. “In my opinion, they deserved a treatment similar to that applied to João Anduro one hundred and seventy years ago.”

  Negumbo cast a stern glance at the subordinate. In four hundred years of history, since the establishment of the first mocambos in Serra da Barriga, you could count on your fingers the number of traitors for the cause of Palmares. In compensation, these few were treated in an exemplary manner.

  “John Anduro betrayed his most sacred oath,” the soba retorts with his eyes again nailed to the stars.

  “But Uiara betrayed her country. What can be more sacred than…”

  “What did you swear when you accepted the summoning of Ebony?”

  “That’s not the point, my ganga. What I meant is…”

  “What did you swear, Lumumba?”

  “To defend my protégés with the sacrifice of life and even of honor.” The younger agent feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he understands the implications of the words he had begun to recite in automatic mode. “Guard the secret of the existence of my protégés with my own life, even from the most probable and eminent citizens of the country.”

  Negumbo smiled as he remembered that his predecessors used to swear an oath on the “protégé” in the singular.

  “So, young man. Uiara and Djogo betrayed their oaths?”

  “No, Ganga. No. But they…”

  “They protected Long Teeth.”

  “…they betrayed their country.”

  “In a
way.” Negumbo sighs in despair. The ever-crucial ethical dilemma of divided loyalties… There are times when he feels much older than his well-to-do seventy-two years. “In order to preserve our protégé and keep his oath, Uiara introduced a Trojan horse into the Anduro to accelerate to Caloji instead of stopping it. Thus, it wounded the interests of the homeland.”

  “Is not that treason, Master?”

  “Imagine that he acted differently.”

  “He would have acted correctly, then. The same bargain shipped the order to bring Long Teeth back by any means available.

  “It is true. Even so, preliminary psychological analysis indicates that Uiara felt he would put his oath at risk if he fulfilled my determination to the letter. After decades of indoctrination to put the interests of our protégés above all and to ensure their well-being, it is understandable that Uiara felt compelled to act as he acted. I was wrong, of course. For this he will suffer the appropriate sanctions. But he respected his vows, and so it is not a question of betrayal.”

  Lumumba contemplates the fixed and immutable stars that scratch the sky. He remains silent for a long time, before expressing his doubts to the soba of the Ebony Circle:

  “What shall we do now, Master? What will become of Ebony?”

  “What we’ve always done. Our mission survives. There are still night-sons to protect.”

  “But Long Teeth?”

  “Why, he’s alive, is not he?”

  “I suppose so. But unobtainable.”

  “It’s true.” Negumbo smiles. “At least for a long time.”

  “How long, my ganga?”

  “At that speed, we estimate it takes about two hundred years to reach Alpha Centauri.”

  “But then, when he finally gets there—”

  “I know. It is very likely that our children and grandchildren will be there waiting for him.”

  “Did he know that when he made his decision?”

  “Of course. Long Teeth has a refined scientific background, even by current standards.”

  “Does the ganga believe he will arrive at his destination alive?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Two hundred years, Master.”