by C. C. Ekeke
Do you Jabei, pledge to join your life with this male, protect him from the Infinite Darkness, guide him down the path of radiance until he leaves this plane and joins the Shining Host?
I so do, Jabei replied eagerly, her inner light as luminous as her partner’s.
Through the illumination bestowed in me by the Living Light, I now pronounce you Merged.
The ensuing light flooded the room entirely, chasing away all and any shadows. Little by little, Surje separated himself and felt the Joined sphere lose its cohesion.
Moments later, the multi-colored radiance faded. The three Voton stood in their solid, naked humanoid forms where the Joined sphere once floated.
Surje returned to his reddish wiry and trim physique, three roundish crests jutting proudly from his skull. Jabei was a lithe and lovely sight, bearing only two round greyish crests atop her head. Her glow burned deep blue with love for her new Merger partner and gratitude to Surje. The male Voton had a strong-jawed face and three blockier gold crests atop his head. He was a bit doughy in physique but carried his weight well. Qarm shone as deeply with love and gratitude as his wife. “Thank you, Pleiad Surje for doing this,” he gushed. “We wanted to start our mission together on Kheldoroth the right way.”
“It was my honor,” Surje smiled with genuine happiness. “We are all One with the Living Light.”
“We are all One with the Living Light,” Qarm and Jabei repeated.
Jabei slipped into white robes matching those of her partner, though more form-fitting than Qarm’s. Surje pulled on a blue button down shirt and grey slacks, all of fine nanoclothe crafted specifically for a Voton.
After Qarm and Jabei left the source, Surje stepped outside the place of worship and onto the preceding walkway. It was night time according to Surje’s chronometer. He placed his hands on a rail, leaning forward, and began zoning out on the foot traffic of beings bustling through Roosevelt’s Teddy District. The ring-like and multi-tiered locality had been crafted with angular high-tech artsy elegance to resemble an actual city-state downtown. An odd location to have a Living Light source, but the contrast always fascinated Surje.
“I knew it!” The sharp, metallic voice from Surje’s right snapped him out of his reverie.
Can’t be. He whipped around and gaped. Two very non-Voton figures approached him. The short, burly being was clearly Thulican, his skin a silvery casing of living metal that few weapons could pierce. The taller and lankier being, a Cryonite, resembled a sculpture of ice crystalline with large spikes jutting backward atop his head. Even in their night-black UComm jumpers, Surje knew them both at a glance.
“Khrome? Tyris?” he realized how annoyed he sounded, how angry his body glow came across, and tempered his voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, Sparky,” Khrome replied with his typical broad and easy smile. “Figured you’d be here since this is the Living Light source you frequent the most.”
Tyris looked less amused, though with no visible mouth or nose, the Cryonite’s mood was always a cause of speculation. “You vanished on us, WHOOSH!” he said, his voice a high, crisp breeze.
Both Tyris and Khrome had been placed on the new Star Brigade combat team. Even Liliana Cortés, away from Star Brigade for over a year, made the cut.
Surje hadn’t. He just needed a night without Star Brigade, to figure out his next move.
“Been so immersed in training,” he sighed, planning to go faith heavy to ward off any suspicion of bitterness. “I needed a reconnect with the Shining Faith…” He realized only two of his best friends were present. “Where’s Jan’Hax?”
“Keeping the shuttle warm while we get you.” Khrome’s smirk grew obnoxiously large, which Surje thought was impossible. “Us four are going out to relax and reprieve.”
“Not tonight!” Going out to rabble rouse was the last thing Surje wanted. “I’m not in the mood for any…” Surje’s frustration and fatigue had left him tongue-tied.
Tyris arched a non-existent eyebrow. “Chicanery?”
“Yes, that,” Surje gestured at Tyris’s apt word choice. “I’m taking part in a Joining ceremony, then it’s back to Hollus for some sleep.”
“Except that you’re NOT,” Khrome countered merrily. He sidestepped a gaggle of clucking Galdorian girls either heading to or returning from a fun evening. “We’re all hanging out away from Zeid for a spell.” A nearby musical concert must have just ended, as the wide walkway Surje and his friends were on had suddenly flooded with beings of all species. The three friends moved their conversation away from the traffic stream and into the Living Light source’s foyer.
“We deserve a night out,” Tyris’s enthused voice resembled wind chimes. “Star Brigade is operational again! We’ll finally get to go on live field missions!”
Their jollity sent a stab through the Voton, darkening his body glow. And the bitterness boiled through. “Easy for you both to say, since you got on CT-1.”
To their credit, Khrome and Tyris didn’t appear surprised by his reaction. “Not everyone could get on one team,” Tyris stated with breezy firmness. The halolights above twinkled off his ice crystalline body. “And it’s not like you bottomed out like Bevrolor. You really stepped up during these last training sessions.”
“Good,” the word tasted like ash in the Voton’s mouth. “But not good enough to get on a combat team.” He shook his head, recalling the dialogue he’d had with his mother not two weeks ago. Maybe she was right. “This may be a sign that Star Brigade might not be where the Living Light is guiding me.”
“Wait. A. Macrom!” Khrome cut him off, his deep blue face no longer smiling. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”
“What I believe doesn’t really matter, if the Living Light illuminates a different path for—”
“Surje,” Tyris’s approach was calmer than Khrome’s, but just as blunt. “What do you think?”
For an instant Surje hated them both. Not for making CT-1 when he didn’t. Both were talented and deserved their placement. He hated them for knowing him so well and realizing he was using platitudes to hide from unpleasant truths. The Voton sighed. “I don’t know. I really want to be a Star Brigadier. But…”
“You’re not thinking about becoming a full-time Joiner celebrant, are you?” asked Khrome. This idea clearly bothered him.
“Well…” Surje really wished they had not come. He didn’t have the headspace for this conversation right now. “Being a celebrant is what I’m good at. Plus, I’d be doing something worthwhile. What is so bad about that?”
Khrome choked back disbelief. “How about a lot?”
Those words drew disapproving looks from Voton coming and going from the Shining Faith source, so the trio wisely strolled away from the place of worship. They finally found a nook of space not far from the source and pedestrian traffic.
“Weren’t you telling us that life was too restrictive?” Tyris continued his interrogation.
“And that your maximal abilities should be used for something good instead?” added Khrome.
Throwing my own words back at me. The Darkness swallow you both! “No, I just…I guess I expected something after being a year of almost nothing,” he admitted. Nwosu coming back had been the first gasp of anything good for Star Brigade in months. To be so close, and drop the ball. He failed. “What if I never make a combat team?”
“You will, Sparky,” Khrome made a face. “For someone with such staunch faith in the Living Light, you really don’t believe enough in yourself.”
Surje turned away in shame. Again, the truth in his friends’ words struck home.
“At least Khal didn’t get on a combat team either,” Tyris chided as they began to walk.
That made Surje laugh. “True,” he agreed through his chuckles. Khal Al Abdullah was the other intelligence field operative under Sam D’Urso. Thank the Radiance that arrogant, self-absorbed worm didn’t get on CT-1. What about the next combat team? And just like that, the Vo
ton’s good mood sobered. “Khal will probably get on a combat team sooner than me.”
Khrome shook his head stubbornly. “Only if you let that happen.”
“Are you going to let that happen?” Tyris asked, leaning so close that Surje could feel the cold air wafting off him.
Surje had no faith in what he was about to say, but said it anyway. “No.”
“Can’t hear you.”
“No,” the Voton barked.
Khrome’s massive hand covered Surje’s shoulder when he grasped it. “We will all be field active and on a combat team someday. Say it with me.”
“Khrome—okay, fine,” Surje grumbled in annoyance. His friends would never let him lose confidence. “We will all be field active and on a combat team someday.”
“Someday,” Tyris waved a finger in the air. “But tonight, we head to the Peloponnesian and marinate.”
Khrome’s round yellow eyes sparkled with ridicule. “You mean ‘celebrate,’ right?”
“Just realized that, so shut up,” Tyris snapped.
Surje rolled his eyes. “Lights be gone! The Peloponnesian again? Jan’Hax went two nights ago!”
Tyris and Khrome exchanged a knowing glance. “Apparently, he’s got a good feeling about tonight,” the Thulican snarked.
That answer didn’t satisfy Surje, not after seeing Jan’Hax already lose so much currency to gambling. “Why do we keep encouraging him?”
Tyris rolled his dark, beady eyes. “We’re letting it slide tonight, since he didn’t get onto a combat team, and you’re a nanoclic away from joining the Shining Way.”
“Okay, okay!” Surje raised his hands in surrender, laughing. Tyris and Khrome were right, as usual. The Voton was worrying too much again. Not believing in himself again. He’d worry about Star Brigade tomorrow. “Point taken and driven home. Let’s go already!” The trio began to walk away from the Living Light source. “Wait,” a realization hit Surje then, annoying him more than enlightening. “Did Jan’Hax not show up because he knew how I’d react to us hitting up a casino?”
“He may have suggested we mollify your anger before we reach the shuttle,” Khrome admitted innocently, or as innocent as the Thulican could ever get.
Surje shook his head and smiled. He knew his friends as well as they knew him. “So are we going to watch and ridicule as Jan’Hax loses his currency, or what?”
Descent
Right now Liliana Cortés wanted to scream in frustration.
If only she had the strength to do so. The doctor lay gasping urgently for breath after having been knocked flat on her back for the umpteenth time. Every inch of her svelte body ached. The clingy workout suit she had on was soaked to the skin in sweat.
As she lay sprawled on the floor of a hardlight hologram suite, a floating spherical mechanoid—her unconquerable foe—hovered overhead. For a moment, Liliana could have sworn that the mechanoid hovered back and forth in a victorious fashion.
The doctor knew becoming a field active Star Brigadier was a mistake. But two weeks ago, she hadn’t realize how large of a mistake. There had been a reason why Liliana staunchly declined to active field duty after her fellowship finished.
But this time around, Sam D’Urso and Captain Habraum Nwosu had been so hard to refuse.
Regardless, the past two weeks only confirmed her massive mistake. She had Pluto-ed nearly every practice session, and almost gotten killed on her first live op.
Anyone else she told about her career change wholeheartedly agreed, especially her mother, during their last Transnet conversation. “I don’t care what trivial need you have to use those cursed powers. For Union’s sakes, quit now,” Dr. Marimar Cortés had snapped.
“You said you were done with that Star Brigade nonsense after your fellowship. Do you actually think you have the stomach to do what they do, míja?” Her mother, ever the great motivator.
Which lead to the past two orvs of Liliana being continuously knocked on her ass. She had been trying to better hone her sonic abilities when it came to aiming and shooting them. It was a simple HLHG program, designed for maximals with energy expulsion-based powers like herself. A small, spherical mechanoid, equipped with a low-level pulse blaster, would float around the room shooting at the young doctor. Her goal was to not only evade the mechanoid’s blasts, but also strike it as well.
The digitized putt-putt of the mechanoid’s blaster became the bane of Liliana’s existence. Despite her improvement in dodging, she would get tagged more often than not. The first time Liliana got tagged this session she squealed at the top of her lungs. It basically stung like a supercharged mosquito bite on the tip of a mule kick.
Captain Nwosu had once told her, “You howl bloody murder at first, but after a while it’ll feel like wee pinpricks.” Liliana reminded herself that this came from a Brigadier who could battle three floating mechanoids at once without getting hit.
She tried sitting up, and her body angrily protested. “Still waiting for those pinpricks!” she shouted.
Her problem wasn’t dodging the blaster shots. Liliana used to run six miles a day before joining Star Brigade, so she had the conditioning. Moreover, these past few days the doctor had progressed to where she could shoot down the mechanoid without getting hit.
But today’s unexpected mission had Liliana second-guessing again, putting too much thought into how she would shoot the mechanoid or which direction to dodge a pulse blast. By the time she made up her mind, BLAM, she’d get drilled.
Liliana couldn’t help it. She was a xenobiologist who analyzed the tattshi out of situations. But life-and-death combat situations were decided on instinct. A Star Brigadier needed good instincts to survive live missions.
“I can’t even survive this training program,” Liliana finally winced her way up to a seated position. After limping back to her quarters, the doctor treated herself to a hydrobathe. Streams of hot water cascaded from the ceiling, washing away the grime and easing the many aches troubling Liliana’s slender body.
Mentally, Liliana remained overwhelmed with doubts. Should she continue struggling as a field-active Brigadier, or work solely in the Medcenter?
Or just resign? She had planned to, after today’s disastrous mission.
But Marguliese’s suggestion, which clearly wasn’t a suggestion, had stayed Liliana’s decision…for now.
The Cybernarr’s appeal still hadn’t given Liliana any idea on how to overcome her hyperspace sickness. Once aboard any spacefaring vessel, she began overanalyzing the reality of being trapped in an enclosed metal tube, hurtling through space at stupefying speeds. At any moment, those speeds could rip the ship into a million pieces. And outside of that ship was space, an infinite everything…and nothing.
Liliana shuddered, continuing pondering her choices as she dried off and threw on greyish pajama pants and a snug burgundy t-shirt with the circular Star Brigade logo. She was still drying her pixie-cut hair when an urgent beeping caught her ear.
Liliana turned. Who in the cosmos is calling me this late? Across the room, her TransNet console with its wall viewscreen lit up with the bold text.
Secure Incoming Call. Section M: Cuende Facility.
Liliana’s eyes widened. Cuende, a small town in northeastern Navarre she was unfortunately familiar with. It could only be one being. Liliana’s professional impasse became background noise as she hurried over to the TransNet console.
“Liliana Cortés. Display caller with TriTran,” she said. Moments later, the 3D image of a human male appeared right in front of Liliana, seated on the floor.
The earthborn human bore a conspicuous resemblance to Liliana. Their hair and eyes were both dark brown; even their faces seemed sculpted of the same oval shape. His skin was much paler—akin to someone who hadn’t seen much natural sunlight. Through his white t-shirt and shapeless pants, he looked a bit doughy from lack of physical activity. And his hair had recently been shorn off.
He saw Liliana and his face lit up. “Ana! Hola!”
Tomás shrugged. “As good as can be in this prisión!”
Her older brother always called her ‘Ana’ or ‘Ana Lucia’ like most family members did, while she preferred to call him ‘Tommy’ instead of his full name, Tomás Carlos.
At least once a week they spoke, either face to face or via TransNet. Yet even when catching her brother on a good day, Liliana still remembered the terrifying fury that had distorted his face years ago. That memory was always a knife thrust to her heart.
The two Cortéses sat and talked about everything and anything happening all over the Galactic Union in their usual rapid-fire Spanish banter. Things felt normal, which Liliana needed in her life right now.
“Still no word from Elena?” Liliana asked, referring to one of their first cousins.
“Aunt Flor spoke to her a week ago. Said she was okay, but that’s it.”
Liliana gasped, surprised and a little hurt. “You heard about Ella and didn’t tell me?”
“Hey!” Tomás threw back. “You were too busy with your Star Brigade thingamajig job.”
The fact that he knew stunned Liliana. “Who told you?”
“Papá. Other than you, who else would’ve told me?”
“Okay,” Liliana straightened, taking note of the sudden bite in Tomás’s voice. She resolved to stay on topic. “I really can’t say too much about what I’m doing—.”
“Thirteen years, Ana,” Tomás interrupted, his face twisting in anger. “Thirteen years and she won’t even call me on the TransNet.”
“Tomás,” Liliana said calmly, knowing what was coming, “let’s talk about something else.”
Tommy rose up, seething. “It was an accident! Why can’t she forgive me?”
“Please,” Liliana struggled to stay firm. These outbursts weren’t unusual, even on his good days. “You know what happens when you get mad like this—”