by Trevor Scott
Sestra continued past the wobbly shelves and through a narrow corridor that Saturn had never been down before. It was only wide enough for a few extra inches on either side of her shoulders. Saturn wondered how Ju-Long was even able to fit inside the tiny passage.
Sestra pulled one of the hallway doors closed, light still barely seeping from under the door. The Dinari kept walking without explanation, pulling Saturn along by her upper arm. Saturn examined the door as they passed by what little light reflected off the walls from Sestra’s glowing orb. The door’s planks were a bare, unfinished wood that appeared newer than the rest of the entryways they’d passed.
“What’s back there?” Saturn asked.
“None of your concern.”
Sestra released her arm and shined the light in her face. Up close, Saturn could see individual specs of gold swirling in the pulsing orb as though populated by a colony of microscopic fireflies. Sestra’s face might have been carved out of rock, her facial muscles frozen in a look of scorn. The Dinari’s mouth curled up into a slender smirk and she continued, “Maybe when you’re ready.”
Sestra moved the light to the rickety boards that formed a solidly-built doorway. They’d reached the end of the passage without Saturn realizing. Light trickled out in several places where the planks didn’t quite come together. The Dinari gripped the rusted metal handle and put her shoulder into the door to open it. It swung inward, scraping along the stone floor and making an excruciatingly high-pitched noise.
Saturn stepped inside and saw Ju-Long sitting next to the Ansaran on a thin sleeping pad. She was examining Ju-Long’s hand and carefully picking out pieces of broken glass. The Ansaran’s skin was a paler blue than she remembered, with fine scales that were only truly visible in the right light and at the right angle. Her eyes were a swirl of blue and green and far smaller than the eyes of an Ansaran male. In fact, they were almost as small as a human’s but far more exotic in shape. Like a Dinari, her pupils were vertical slits, now much wider than normal in the low light of the back room. Her pointed ears jutted back from her bald head and were probably her most memorable feature apart from the black geometric tattoos which lined her graceful neck.
The Dinari touched one of the holes on the side of her head that served as an ear. She shook her head out of frustration and said to Saturn in her gravelly voice, “I need to take care of something for Zega. She’s your responsibility now.”
5
Liam Kidd eased his foot off the hover bike’s accelerator and came to a halt in the alley outside one of Zega’s many warehouses. The building was a single-story structure made from a mix of clay and corrugated metal. It housed a number of items, the manner of which changed based on Ansaran inspection schedules. Zega’s spies had a knack for uncovering the schedules far enough in advance to play a sort of shell game with them.
Liam dismounted his bike and approached the metal doorway, which extended three feet over his head and was wide enough to fit three of him abreast. The sand under Liam’s feet was loose and flat, a reminder that no one not invited dared tread the ground nearby. A feeling crept up inside his stomach. The Dinari knew exactly what the little building was and who owned it. It was no different than the many buildings owned by Vesta Corporation on Earth. Word had a way of spreading quickly. Liam put his palm against the sensor to the right of the door and gears began to churn behind the metal until the door finally slid up on its track.
Inside, a single orb of light illuminated near the ceiling at the center of the room, the rays hardly managing to penetrate the densely populated chamber. The sun that penetrated the room from the outside wasn’t much help either. The building couldn’t have been more than twenty feet square and had a few rows of steel shelves filled with hard-shelled boxes and leather bags bulging in awkward places. He pulled a flat disc the size of a Terran credit out of his pants pocket and held it up in his palm. A hologram projected outward, its orange hue coloring the dimly lit walls.
Numbers scrolled through countless iterations until they finally fell on a three and a four, appearing as lines and dots that his mind translated for him into Earth Common. Liam counted three shelves from the left and looked up to the fourth shelf, just above eye level. The sole item on the shelf was a brown leather bag that was as long as his arm, a single strap running the length of it. The bag bulged in places that made his thoughts run rampant. The thought that anything could have been in that bag excited him to no end.
Liam returned the thin disc to his pocket and grabbed the bag’s strap. When he pulled it from the shelf, the weight of it nearly took his shoulders out of their sockets as the bag clunked to his feet. He heard a strange metallic sound from within that reminded him of his time as a smuggler. Terran credits had been light; made from a material that had tracking software built in that was immensely difficult to counterfeit and had the benefit of also being nearly indestructible. Because of this, Vesta Corporation preferred to deal with gold as it was harder to track. He was beginning to understand why Zega had sent him on this job. It was a payoff.
•
Nix crawled closer to the edge of the rooftop, straining his eyes in his magnifying goggles. He focused the lenses on a small building’s open door, a hover bike waiting rider-less outside. Nix had seen buildings like that before, and it usually spelled trouble. He squinted, and through the dim entryway, Nix saw him. Liam’s human appearance was unmistakable. Add in the tangled blond hair and deep facial scar and he stood out like a Narran Flemox. Nix smiled at the thought of the giant amphibian with its bright purple skin and pustules that oozed stinky green liquid from its pores. Liam was carrying a brown bag out of the warehouse, struggling with the weight. It took him a minute to heave it onto his hover bike and mount up. The building’s metal door automatically closed as Liam sped away, his vehicle hardly seeming to notice the increased burden.
Nix removed the goggles and rested his elbows on the hardened clay lip at the edge of the rooftop. The sun’s glare found his eyes and made him lower his gaze to the street down below. That street ran along the whole edge of Sector Seven and had few residents. The outskirts of the colony were hardly a place for the civilized. Nix didn’t like the look of things. Whatever job Zega had Liam doing was anything but benign. He needed to find out what was in that bag. It had been heavy. Was it weapons? The bag would only have held a few Ansaran lasers so it seemed unlikely.
The Dinari came up to his feet and powered up his hover bike, waiting patiently with its almost silent idling hum. He mounted the long vehicle and turned on the square map display. Nix could see Liam’s bike approaching one of the larger spires in the area. It was the one in closest proximity to the Caretaker’s tower, near Sector Eight. He swiped his hand through the image and the hologram disappeared. Angrily, Nix pointed his toe, forcing the accelerator down to full, shooting off the edge of the roof and coming down on the street below, sending a plume of sand out the back of his bike as it cut into the ground. Behind him, the cloud of dust rose violently into the air.
•
Liam craned his neck in an attempt to make out the top of the spire before him. It was no use. The tower faded out of view, swallowed up by the orange and yellow sky. Liam powered down his bike and dismounted. An Ansaran guard quickly approached him, clad in his sand-colored armor and oblong helmet that accentuated his sloping head and angular chin. The many small plates that made up his armor had been filled in with sand so that with every movement bits of the coarse powder sprinkled down to the ground. He was a jittering hourglass who never seemed to run out of sand to count the seconds.
“State your purpose,” the guard said in a deep voice that reverberated against the hardened material that protected his neck.
Liam gripped the strap on the dense leather bag and lifted it off the back of his hover bike, heaving it over his shoulder with great effort.
“Vidu expects me.”
The Ansaran guard tilted his head, examining Liam’s bike. Liam could see the faint outline of green
text flowing behind the Ansaran’s black visor. Perhaps instructions from an unseen master. A moment later, the alien lowered his weapon and stepped to the side. He cautioned, “Vidu doesn’t like outsiders.”
“He’ll like me.”
Liam brushed past the guard and approached the Spire’s massive double doors. Each of the spires he’d seen had different nuances, as though the architect was different for each, but they’d all had the same master. The building was distinctly Ansaran despite the swirling detail engrained in the door that was decidedly at odds with the Caretaker’s tower. The doors were tall enough to fit a Kurazon, easily twelve feet in height.
The thick doors swung inward when Liam was within a few steps of the entrance. Inside, a staircase wound up and around to his left, disappearing behind the tall ceiling above in an ascent Liam knew led all the way to the top of the spire, should one have the energy. To his right was a slab of stone that was cut out of the single piece that formed the floor. Liam made his way over to the platform and knelt down in the center, something he’d learned from previous encounters with the strange technology.
Purple light illuminated the square cutout of stone and the platform rose up a few feet before shooting off in the opposite direction as the staircase, moving as though along a double helix, spiraling up the tower at speeds that could hardly have been considered safe. Liam braced his palms against the stone and tried not to look out the windows that lined the spire. The concave glass filled in the grooves of the tower as would a screw. Nix had once told him that the grooves helped funnel the wind, which allowed them to build even higher. He’d also mentioned that the glass was almost as strong as stone. Liam had seen the strange properties of the glass before, enough at least to know it wasn’t the same as any glass he’d seen on Earth.
After passing countless floors, each providing only a glimpse at the lifestyles of the Ansaran residents, the platform began to slow and Liam finally cautioned a glance outside. He was so high up that the Dinari structures below were indistinguishable from the sand around them, but for the tiny pinpricks which milled around the streets and scarce vehicles that sped along the dirt roadways. The stone square stopped and dropped into a slot on the floor, the purple light dissipating even more quickly than it had appeared.
Liam rose up to a standing position, the leather strap of the bag cutting into his shoulder under the strain. He shuffled off the platform and approached a white door with precise lines and a sheen that reflected light back at him from the window. The reflective double doors opened as he approached and he was met by two Ansaran guards wearing the same sand-colored armor as the Ansaran outside, only theirs was pristine by comparison. They examined him momentarily before stepping aside to let him pass.
Liam entered the large antechamber and immediately noticed that the floor was made from the same white material as the doors, its polish reflecting the light from the many windows as he walked. The guards closed the doors behind him and Liam looked back over his shoulder. He could see right through the entryway into the landing outside as though the door was half translucent.
“Who has Zega sent this time?”
The haughty voice made Liam turn back to his front, where an Ansaran stood, clad in white armor that covered his shoulders and torso, his pale blue skin contrasting with the brilliant ashen plates. His leggings emulated the tiny scales that covered his body, much like that of a fish, only these were harder and with jagged edges that didn’t look safe to touch. At his shoulders were ornate silver leaves which were connected by a chain which hung down over his chest. They supported a light blue cape that was so unspoiled it could never before have left the spire. Anything that graced the streets of Surya was immediately touched by sand.
Liam had become accustomed to the fine grains lodging in his long and gnarled hair. It was an inescapable fact of living in the desert. No dust storms required.
“I’m Liam Kidd. Zega’s instructed me—”
“An outsider,” the Ansaran interrupted, his pale blue face contorting out of disgust.
The Ansaran’s large black eyes were haunting, only showing bits of white at the edges when his gaze shifted to the side.
“I take it you’re Vidu, then.”
“I am Vidu of House Ansara and you will address me with the respect due to someone of my station.”
Liam swung the leather bag off his shoulder and dropped it to the floor by his feet, the loud clunk silencing any further ramblings. The bag’s strap came undone when it hit the tile and several hexagonal pieces of a golden metal came tumbling out onto the floor. The center of each piece was pressed down with a picture of an unfamiliar Ansaran face.
Vidu’s disgust faded and his mouth hung ajar.
Liam commented, “Zega told me you’d know what this means.”
Vidu collected himself and remarked, “Zega. He certainly has a way, doesn’t he?”
“So, we’re square?”
The Ansaran motioned with his hand and one of his guards appeared at his side. Vidu pointed to the bag and his Ansaran lackey began picking up the hexagonal currency. When he’d gathered them all up, he picked up the bag with ease and slung it over his shoulder, awaiting further orders.
“Ansaran Rooks might not mean much on Surya, but on Ansara this much would buy a ship. A fine ship. Do you know what a fine ship costs?”
“All too well,” Liam responded.
Vidu nodded and said, “Very well. Tell Zega that as acting Head of Security on this colony, he’ll get no trouble from me if he can deliver what he’s promised.”
Liam smiled. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Vidu moved closer, now mere steps away. His stature would have been imposing even without his menacing armor. He was easily half a head taller than Liam and his demeanor was anything but inviting, despite the peace offering. He said in a cutting tone, “If Toras discovers our plan, the deal is off. So will be, I suspect, our heads.”
“Discretion is our specialty.”
Vidu opened his mouth and pointed his finger, but ultimately lowered his hand before he could come up with a clever retort. Instead, he simply said, “For an Outsider, you’re not as repulsive as I would have imagined.”
“Well, I’d hate to offend,” Liam said curtly before turning and making for the exit, leaving Vidu speechless in his tall ivory tower.
6
The spire stood nearly a few hundred feet apart from any other building. It was commonly said among the Ansarans that maintaining distance would demonstrate their superiority. Nix had heard a lot of things when he worked in the Caretaker’s tower. No one seemed to worry that he was listening. After all, he was a peasant to their eyes. A servant whose only purpose was to obey. Any idea to the contrary was clearly a delusion.
Nix drew his goggles down over his eyes and adjusted the focus, zooming in on the spire’s entrance. Liam had been gone a while. Too long, in fact. Nix came out of the prone position and up to one knee. He seemed to be making a habit of finding his way onto rooftops. The sun was beating down overhead in its near midday arc and Nix found his tongue salivating more than usual. He collected his saliva and spat out a large glob on the clay roof. It took mere seconds for the spittle to evaporate.
Nix pulled his goggles up and rested them on his sloped forehead. He looked along the street adjacent the spire. The road had a gradual curve in it allowing him to see the facades of most of the buildings nearby, though a few of the rooftops were out of his view. Instead of finding a higher vantage point, he’d opted for the clearest line of sight to the spire’s entrance. Now he’d begun to regret that decision. He was one glint of the sun away from being spotted.
To his left, Nix heard a door slam shut. He leaned over the edge of the rooftop to get a better look. It was a single Dinari, wrapped up in tightly-woven white clothes which were stained with specs of red and black, the soft fibers absorbing the droplets with ease. Nix instinctively covered his mouth with his palm. That Dinari had no business being up and about.
Even though he was fifty feet away, Nix could see he was sick with something terrible. But it wasn’t just any sickness. It was the sickness. The Dinari Phage Sickness.
Nix hadn’t seen a case of it since he was a child. It was rumored that the Ansarans had been using the virus to control the Dinari population, as it had no effect on the Ansarans at all. Nix didn’t know if that was true or not, but he’d always accepted it out of spite, if for no other reason. The Dinari began meandering in the direction of the spire as though lost in a daze.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nix saw the spire’s main double doors burst open and a figure appear out of the darkness within. The Dinari lowered his goggles and adjusted the zoom. It was Liam. This time without the bag. Whatever he’d come to do, it was done. Liam stopped at the top of the stairs and exchanged words with the Ansaran guard.
Nix zoomed out and tried to locate the sick Dinari, but he was gone. He drew up his goggles and spotted the sickly man sprinting toward the spire at a rate that seemed implausible given his condition. He was gunning straight for Liam.
“Shit,” Nix cursed.
He scrambled to his feet and raced to his hover bike. He’d never be able to make the distance in time. He’d have to take a more extreme measure. Nix reached over the top of his seat and retrieved an Ansaran laser rifle mounted on the other side. His own Dinari energy weapon would be too inaccurate at such a distance.
Nix ran back to the edge of the rooftop and knelt down. Using his goggles as a scope, he breathed out and fired a single blast. He caught the sickly Dinari in his shoulder but the blast hardly slowed him down. He seemed to be rabid, unable to notice he was in pain.