Tethered Worlds: Unwelcome Star

by Gregory Faccone

  Jordahk's mind made calculations unbidden to avoid the subject at hand. His father was 163, just hitting the middle of vigere, the long plateau of years during which someone with a lifetime therapy was on top of their physical game. By "young," Kord probably meant around his long adolescence Midday, some 140 years ago, about the time they decided on his adult link.

  What was space like 60 years after the end of the Sojourners' Crusade? Jordahk mused about that era's infatuation with scientum. It was going to accomplish all the miracles of fading mystic.

  People eventually realized the practical-minded imprimaturs were not Sojourners, and that creating common mystic technology was never going to advance the craft. Imprimaturs had a good thing going forming grav weaves, passable mystic links, and lifetime therapies. The latter were becoming hardly better than their scientum counterparts. They lived a life of comfort and rarely pushed too hard in mystic creation. Thus they avoided the Onus, the mental deterioration that took some Sojourners during the war. Jordahk's hobby was hunting old mystic tech.

  "Pops fought beside the Sojourners, right? I don't blame him for trying to redeem their reputation, if it's possible."

  Kord raised his head. "Many were disillusioned by the Sojourners withdrawal, and scared by the few taken with the Onus. But with fear of the Perigeum on the rise, maybe they'll finally look past that." He paused in thought. "Let's face it, without Sojourners, well, I don't think the Vallum Corps can hold back the P-stars forever."

  A clanking sound interrupted them. "Something's definitely broken," Vittora said.

  Jordahk willed the fanicle to hold together.

  "Aristahl just said to make it up Prospector's Pass," Kord replied.

  The cooling air whipped past Vittora's braids. "It's still a few minutes away. We won't get there as fast as I'd like."

  Jordahk snorted and thanked heaven for small miracles. The family fanicle was going to need a serious overhaul. "What does Pops think I can do? You saw what happened last time I tried heavy mystic stuff."

  Aristahl had returned from one of his mystery trips with a couple of autobuss legacy shells. He insisted Jordahk try to fire one. They went to a remote site near the cabin. Mystic tech could be as harmless as scientum, as long as it wasn't asked to do the impossible.

  Jordahk had sensed rather than felt an incredible heat when he touched those shells. The eight-sided pieces were about the size of an old school shotgun shell. They felt war-era old. Each was composed of platinum group metals typical of such tech, and bore an onyx cap.

  Kord's experience was with scientum. Jordahk's mystic instruction was left to Aristahl. They spent a full day together, autobuss loaded with the legacy shell. When Jordahk finally coaxed the relic to fire the results were unusual. After passing out, he awakened with a mind-numbing headache that lasted for three days. It was an experience Jordahk was more than happy to leave in the past.

  "You've got the gift, Jordahk. Created by," Kord hesitated, "my grandfather, and passed down to you."

  Jordahk mused about his grandsire, Aristahl's father. He regarded the Thule-Riss, now just dark points against the sky. No one talked about his grandsire except in halted passing references. They knew more, and someday he would, too.

  "The gift." Jordahk's brows rose, betraying his lack of conviction.

  The box chimed twice. Vittora's shoulders sank for only a second before she sat back up and willed more speed out of their stricken vehicle.

  "Now what?" Kord grumbled. "I'm beginning to hate that thing, and I built it!" He squinted behind through zoomies.

  Jordahk never managed to get comfortable with the thicker zoom feature rets. Knowing his father, he probably had some night vision enhancements as well.

  Kord gave a start and briefly lowered his head. He wasn't a praying man, although Vittora was working on him. He turned expectantly toward the driver's seat, and she answered his unspoken question.

  "This is all we're going to get."

  "Armor-piercing, Highearn," Kord said flatly. He swapped out a magazine.

  Jordahk gazed into the distance and saw it. A black metal quadruped the size of a lion was galloping their way. Its clawed feet tore up the earthpack at robotic speeds. Its dusty wake was illuminated by egress light. It was closing. Fast.

  Shock and disbelief warred within Jordahk. "A, a dawg."

  Some engineer long ago must have thought himself quite witty coming up with the D.A.W.G. acronym. The play on words became so successful that what the letters originally stood for had long since dropped out of the common lexicon. Dawgs were high-end, low-tech security bots designed to elicit fear and tear apart human flesh. Remorseless machines, they showed no mercy in attack mode. Many planets outlawed them. Too much destructive power, too little intelligence—the very qualities that made them so intimidating.

  As the dawg neared, Jordahk tried to cover his fear with cynicism. "Glowing red eyes? Really?"

  Kord stretched out his grister, autostock unfolding. A vibrating pulse washed over the fanicle with the thrum of two bursts. Sparking lines splashed across the dawg's sunken red spots.

  "I'm more worried about the images those eyes are transmitting," he said. "Highearn?"

  A faint beam emanated from the eye cluster atop the fanicle. It shone onto the dawg.

  "I'm degrading its visual feed," the AI said, "but the rest of its telemetry's going through. Your ammunition will be ineffective."

  Hope springing eternal, Kord emptied a magazine into it anyway; firing bursts into joints and snout, anything remotely vulnerable. But he knew, perhaps better than most, that there were no weak spots on a dawg.

  It continued undeterred. The dawg's tiny brain registered minimal threat in its prey. It called to the rest of the pack through telemetry—and a completely unnecessary howl.

  "That's got to be for intimidation," Jordahk insisted.

  He aimed the autobuss, and it thunked. Each cartridge could fire five ammo triangles before being fully consumed. Jordahk expended a couple of cartridges. Sheets of sparks flew off dark metal. It was enough super accelerated impact to stop a light vehicle, and still the dawg came.

  "Not enough purchase. All we can see are sharp angles and curves," Kord said. A dawg was designed specifically to resist small arms fire from the front. It carried no ranged weapons. Little on it could be broken. It was all armored limbs and tearing jaws. In fairness, they weren't carrying proper ammunition for such a task. "Drak. I wasn't expecting a radiating war tonight."

  "As long as that thing's looking at us, every bad guy from here to orbit knows precisely where we are," Vittora said. "Now that they're serious, a lot of ranged hurt can be thrown our way." She surveyed a wide arc.

  They heard claws clomping the earthpack, then whirring robotics.

  Kord glanced at Jordahk's bag. "Don't you have anything armor-piercing?"

  Jordahk sighed. "There's not a cartridge in this depleted collection that'll do the job."

  "Then use the shell"

  Jordahk felt his face contract. Fear gripped whatever parts of him it didn't already hold. "You... you saw what happened last time," he stammered. "Pops isn't here, and we don't have all day."

  The shell was stashed at the bottom of the sling bag. Max was ordered to keep it there, making sure the bag never presented it. Jordahk could feel the relic taunting him.

  Vittora made brief eye contact with her son. "Jordahk, please," was all she said. A moment later, Jordahk found himself quite inexplicably reaching to the bottom of the bag.

  He removed the shell mechanically, in the shadow of two unpalatable choices. It was the second of the matching pair Aristahl had brought back. Like its twin, this shell had an ocher tint that Jordahk could just make out in the dim light. True legacy shells were custom pieces designed by their creator for a myriad of specific functions. These two were about heat, which was quite apparent by touch. He pushed it into the center autobuss chamber, onyx side out.

  Even before the pistol clicked shut it hummed strang
ely. Jordahk experienced sensations felt only once before, but impossible to forget. The shell poised itself to take over the autobuss, and the two sought connection with Jordahk's mind. It wasn't his imagination. He recoiled.

  In the growing darkness Vittora issued a command to her compy, and a VAD appeared between her and the windscreen. It displayed a light enhanced and slightly artificial version of the scenery as her compy painted estimated colors on the fly.

  "The trees thin ahead. We're going to be exposed to the valley for a stretch. I don't want to go past with that thing on our tail."

  Kord looked through his rets. "Can't we ride down the embankment?"

  "We can," she said, "but it'll really slow us down." She left unspoken the consequences of the dawg catching up. Kord frowned.

  The beast was closer now. They heard the stressed tones of its inner workings. It wanted them bad. Jordahk sweat profusely, locked in a mental wrestling match with an invisible opponent, and losing.

  "When we get there, try to edge halfway over," Kord said. He turned back to his son. "Now would be a good time, Jordahk."

  Jordahk's hands trembled. He was scared and ashamed. Was he imperiling them all for fear of focusing his mind into a small hunk of metal? But a world was lodged within high-level mystic creations, a universe in which to get lost.

  The open secret of mystic tech lay not in its metal or molecules, its atoms or even its quantum structure. The power resided in quantics; what one wag physicist dubbed "the sub-quantum circus." Down at that level, there were no rules, no predictability. Conventional science couldn't understand it. To varying extents, mystic harnessed it.

  Perhaps harnessed was too strong a word. It was more like an ongoing tug-of-war, a strained stalemate pitting sub-quantum circus versus the user's mind.

  "We're running out of time," Kord said. He slapped in another magazine, not that it would make any difference.

  Jordahk despised his weakness, but he knew a mind might never be the same after a bad go in the circus. Sketchy records indicated a few Sojourner minds never returned at all. Jordahk pondered the possibility of either trapping his mind in the deepest quantics, or having his body torn apart by the dawg with equal foreboding. The night really was about bad choices.

  They passed onto the vulnerable stretch of road. The fanicle bumped and listed as Vittora took it halfway off earthpack. Kord's box chimed three times in rapid succession.

  "Sniper," Highearn said.

  Vittora jerked the controls, initiating an evasive swerve when a taut string of flaming air was painted across their vision. It originated somewhere in the valley below, where Vittora happened to be peering at that instant. It disintegrated any part of the fanicle it touched. It also grazed her face, passing through her cheek, burning away a third of her jaw and teeth. It went on to vaporize a trough along her skull, exposing her brain where her ear had been only a second before.

  Vittora emitted a horrid gargle. The fanicle lurched as she fell away from the controls. Jordahk barely grasped the rear support in time to prevent ejection.

  In a flash Kord caught his wife, undeterred by turbulence. He cradled her head carefully, wounded side up. "Highearn," he yelled, "get us into that embankment!" His vision blurred as he watched Vittora's ruined jaw move in a silent whisper.

  Jordahk could only observe at the tableau in stunned horror. His limbs felt dead. He couldn't let himself go into shock now. As his perception reddened, he surmised he was about to pass out. "I'm such a faux."

  Then, like a dagger strike, Jordahk realized everything really was getting redder. He whipped around and saw glowing red eyes ten meters away. The dawg opened its snout like a metal saber-toothed tiger and let out a mechanical roar. In the distance multiple replies echoed.

  Kord and Vittora had poured so much time into him, so much of themselves into him. Now he was letting them down. The image of his mother's wrecked face was burned into his vision. It seemed like the dawg was laughing at him.

  A sense of righteous indignation swept over him. It ignited against the sell-out politicians, burned against the manipulative Perigeum, and it flared white hot against that radiating dawg. At that moment he cared more for his parents' welfare than anything.

  Jordahk's mind was already traveling elsewhere when he heard his father call his name as if from a distance. Directions beyond his understanding were resonance transmitted into the autobuss through his touch. It hummed a low throb as his link tingled in his skull. Jordahk's anger flowed into the shell, and it turned molten in his mind's eye.

  The autobuss changed shape in Jordahk's hand. Ports opened, and the barrel lengthened. He leveled it at the dawg. One, then two autostocks unfolded to brace against his shoulder. His anger continued to boil, and he went farther down into the Sojourner's construct. His mind's eye saw colors and orbits. Everything he passed released more energy.

  The autobuss shook violently in his hand. An autostock Jordahk had never seen unfolded to twine itself around the barrel. An alarm went off in the back of his mind. He was taking this shell too far. All around him was burning light.

  Then he felt the signature near its core, the maker of this legacy shell. He couldn't see his face, but a sense of familiarity, and formality was evident.

  "Stay on target, kid," Max interrupted from far away. "A smart barrel's no use when it gets like this."

  Jordahk grappled with the bucking, elongated pistol, fighting to aim it at those searing red eyes. He didn't remember giving a mental command, nor pressuring the trigger studs, but a second later the environment flashed.

  It sounded like a mountain of taut metal strings being torn asunder. The autobuss pushed out a column of molten heat that belonged in the center of a sun. It had a purple tinge at its edges and for a full second stretched as far as the eye could see.

  The energy moved without regard for air or matter. Aiming low, Jordahk swept upward, atomizing a swath of dawg from bottom to top. The arc of molten sun rose through a score of trees. They burst into flame before gravity could pull down their suspended limbs. The arc continued, slamming through a mountain outcrop. A chunk the size of a dwelling slid down, crashing beyond the burning woods with an earthshaking tremor.

  Jordahk's vision blackened around the edges. The last thing he saw, with great satisfaction, were two dawg halves plowing to a halt. Its red eyes went dark, and Jordahk's consciousness followed.

  Kord cradled his wife's head in one hand and swiped his eyes with the other. His mind churned. In one minute, Jordahk accomplished what had taken him a day the last time he attempted it. Although that staggering level of activation was cause for concern.

  The burning trees and fallen rock receded in their wake. With his son passed out, Kord was the last man standing. He fought back emotion as he assessed his wife's grievous wounds. "Highearn, she's still bleeding." He grabbed field patches from their med kit and carefully laid them across her exposed brain.

  "I'm coordinating blood micros with her AI for shock prevention," Highearn said. "Her circulatory system is barely holding. We're near our limit. She needs a nurse immediately."

  It was slow going through the exposed stretch. They hugged the embankment, dodging rocks and trees, occasionally swerving back onto the earthpack. Kord felt twinges of unease glimpsing the retreating valley. They must have needed the dawg's telemetrics for such a precise long-range shot.

  Unmistakable metallic howls sounded distantly. The other dawgs had reached their fallen pack mate.

  "That's right, slags," Kord said darkly to himself.

  Inside, a critical mass grew, a fusion bomb of hate about to be unleashed upon any Perigeum bastard who barred his way. Jordahk's autobuss began humming raggedly, and then rattled.

  "Don't." A synthesized version of his wife's voice interrupted his thoughts. He looked down at her pained eyes, seeing more affecting them than physical distress. Her throat moved in a strained sub-whisper, interpreted by her AI. "Don't go—there."

  Her eyes bored into his heart, an
d the black critical mass dissipated. He felt shame then, and couldn't meet her gaze. "I..." he stammered. Self-reproach washed over him. He was aware of the damnable door he'd quite nearly opened. No one, especially no one of his lineage should ever go there. After a moment of calm, he was relieved to realize he really didn't want to.

  Then he faced Vittora's eyes again. They were already filled with forgiveness.

  "Forgive yourself," she said.

  That, Kord knew, was going to take more time. "Highearn, how long until the dawgs?"

  "Approximately one minute current speed."

  Jordahk groaned. Kord was glad his son had not witnessed his near failure. Jordahk's road was long, and someday he would have to face down that same demon. Through zoomies Kord made out a gaining trio of dawgs. All he could do now was trust his father's words and get up Prospector's Pass.

  As the glaring red eyes neared, he stared them down without fear. Jordahk was rousing to the sight of the mechanical beasts. But he would also see his father's true resolution.

  Jordahk sat up, startled. Then his father's expression put him at ease. He reached over the seat to touch his mother's arm, trying not to look at the horrible wound.

  "Nice job with the shell," Kord said. "You finished that dawg, a stand of trees, and a good-sized chunk of mountain."

  "Why wasn't I faster? If I hadn't been so afraid, maybe..." Jordahk's voice trailed off.

  Kord saw his son's glance barely touch Vittora's face. "You did the best you could."

  "Did I?" Jordahk shook his head.

  "Jordahk..." Vittora spoke through her compy. Though the synthesized delivery was flat, the loving admonishment was clear.

  Jordahk sat up, willing himself to smile at her. He took a deep breath of increasingly chilly night air. Adams Rush had a cool, crisp winter. It would soon be here.

  Behind them the sound of twelve clomping claws grew loud.

  "Fork ahead," Highearn stated.

  "At last," Kord said. "Up the pass, Highearn."

  The fanicle moved briefly onto the exposed earthpack before banking up onto the wooded pass. Another taut wire of flames flashed across the pass just behind them. The sniper shot cracked a tree in half before the burning line became a fading afterimage.