by Stel Pavlou
“Here you go,” Ben Quick announced upon his return, setting a glass jar down on the table between them. Floating in a syrupy liquid, the ghostly white biomass that was once a rat named Hex swam happily back and forth. “What’s left of your anatom,” he explained.
Ionica snatched the jar out of the way. “Sit down. Shut up. And listen to this,” she said.
Puzzled, but in no position to argue. Ben took a seat next to them. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
Daniel took a moment to collect his thoughts. So much had happened, how could he possibly organize it all into a coherent story?
He took a breath.
And when he was ready—Daniel told them everything.
Hours later, they found him a place to rest. There were no cabins aboard the Equinox. It wasn’t a ship designed for long stretches in deep space. Instead there were bunk compartments hidden away inside the bulkheads of the long arms that stretched out from the Sphere, the central command structure.
Ionica hit a button and the white compartment door rolled up to reveal a bed and various useful little amenities. “It’s more comfortable than it looks,” she said.
“It’ll be fine,” Daniel replied, thankful. “What happens now?”
“Just get some rest,” Ben advised.
Daniel nodded, dutifully lying down to do just that, Hex in a jar tucked up under his arm. He waited for about two minutes, and then, when he was fairly certain that the two Truth Seekers had gone, he got straight back up again.
He held the jar up to his face, watching Hex swimming around. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he said. “We’ll fix this.”
28
HEX A. DECIMAL 2.0
Bizarre and strange-looking anatoms littered the Equinox Repair Bay.
Some were huge, lumbering creatures that towered over the room. Others sported fleshy armored plates. Another had eight arms and a string of eyes all around its head.
Elsewhere, creature suits sat ready, their mechanical chests hollow and open, waiting for the biological parts to finish growing in the glass jars next to them.
Setting Hex in a jar down on a workbench, Daniel began perusing the spare part bins for anything that might be suitable.
“You must be Daniel Coldstar. The Sinja who isn’t a Sinja. The stowaway boy,” said the disembodied voice of a girl from somewhere across the other side of the Repair Bay.
“Hello?”
“I thought so,” she said. With goggles perched on her head, and carrying bits of machinery and bundles of light-wire, the girl emerged from behind a parts cabinet and stuck out her hand at Daniel. She attempted to smile, but it looked more like a sort of grimace. “I’m Astrid Always. Always Astrid. Always right.”
“Always getting on my nerves,” said Ben Quick, coming through the door.
The girl stuck her nose in the air. “Ben doesn’t like me because he’s not as smart as I am.”
“I don’t like you because you’re annoying,” said Ben.
“Ionica doesn’t seem to like you either,” Daniel observed, looking at Ben.
Astrid laughed so hard it verged on a cackle.
“That’s different,” Ben protested.
“I’m not judging,” said Daniel. “You just seem to have a way with girls, is all I’m saying.”
“Oh, you noticed that too,” Astrid remarked. “Amazing skill, isn’t it?”
Ben tried his best to ignore her, keeping his focus on Daniel. “Why aren’t you resting? And why didn’t you tell me you wanted to work on your anatom?”
How was he supposed to respond to that? Might as well just come straight out and say it. “I didn’t think you’d let me,” Daniel said.
“Let you?” Ben seemed genuinely baffled. “I don’t get to decide what you can and can’t do. You do.”
“Somehow that’s hard to believe.”
Ben shrugged. “Listen. I just thought you might want a hand.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ve got some brilliant ideas. Brilliant. I say we give it a horn,” Ben said. “I think it’d be spectacular, an anatom with a horn.”
“What’s a rat going to do with a horn?” Daniel asked.
Ben shrugged. “I don’t know. Gore things.”
“No horns. No trunks. No flappy wings,” Astrid said, plopping herself down at a bench, setting to work on her own repair job, which was difficult to discern since she was only working on its internal skeleton. “If your anatom is as old as I’ve heard, it’s been a rat for over a hundred years. It won’t know how to be anything else,” she said. “At the very least it should remain a quadruped. It won’t know what to do with any extra limbs. Besides, you really shouldn’t be trying to build an anatom without a blueprint anyway,” she mused.
“I have schematics,” Ben grumbled. “Here.” He tossed a small glass card onto the table. Holocules fizzed into the air, forming a huge bearlike creature with metal pincers at the end of one arm—and a gigantic curved metallic horn.
Daniel couldn’t quite fathom what he was seeing. Reading the description didn’t help. “What’s a catawampus?”
“Well, it’s a, you know. A thing.”
“Are they dangerous?”
Ben smirked, before realizing that Daniel was being perfectly serious.
“You’ve never seen a catawampus before?”
“No . . .”
“Oh, they’re ferocious creatures,” he explained, watching the miniature holocule anatom lumber around the workbench trying to smash anything in its path. “If they take a dislike to you—well . . .”
Inside the jar, Hex began swimming around, frantically trying to get Daniel’s attention.
Daniel tried his best to decode all the tentacle waving. “He seems excited,” he said, unconvinced. “But I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“Well, if you’re scared . . .”
Astrid rolled her eyes. “Stop it, Ben. He obviously doesn’t know!”
“Know what?”
Ben brushed it aside. “Don’t worry about it.”
“There is no such thing as a catawampus,” said Astrid, giving the design the most cursory glance. “And there’s no such thing as this creature either. He just threw a bunch of bits and pieces together. You may as well call it Mish-Mash.”
“It’s called a catawampus,” Ben insisted, annoyed.
“It’s called a complete disaster,” said Astrid, directing her focus back toward her own project. “Just saying.”
Daniel turned on Ben. “You were making fun of me.”
Ben shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Huh,” said Daniel, eyeing him closely. “Interesting.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Daniel brushed it aside. “Don’t worry about it—”
“Did you bring the corposum?” asked Astrid, setting a pair of magnifying goggles on her nose and peering over the rims at Daniel. “The squishy bit.”
“Oh, right.” Daniel set the jar down on the workbench, with Hex now happily swimming around inside it.
“Well, that’s a start, I suppose,” she said.
Over the next several hours Daniel and Ben gathered the parts they needed, or as close as they could get. But after a while, Astrid became so irritated watching the pair make so many basic mistakes, the boys had managed to rope her into the project too.
Only once she had tested all the circuits and could be absolutely certain that they wouldn’t have to strip the thing down and start again did she tell Daniel that he could open up the jar and take Hex out.
“Now you can be pretty rough with him,” she explained. “You have to press every inch of the corposum into that receptacle or he won’t take—that’s it. Good.”
Daniel watched, enthralled, as Hex settled into his new creature suit, wriggling around and getting comfortable. Within a few minutes his tendrils extended out in all directions, attaching themselves to the suit, fusing with the all the necessary interfaces, until quite suddenly the anatom was ta
king his first baby steps.
Daniel punched the air. “All right, Hex! You’re back!”
Hex wobbled on his feet, lashing out with his massive metal pincer to steady himself and chopping the workbench table in two. Utterly perplexed, the anatom didn’t know which way to turn. He opened his mouth, but his lips flapped up and down without making any noise.
He glanced down at his paws. But they weren’t paws. It was clear he recognized absolutely nothing about his own body. Petrified, he glanced around the workshop, wide-eyed.
“Hex, Hex!” Daniel urged. “It’s okay, easy!”
But the anatom wasn’t listening. Spying a tiny little hiding spot that would have served him well when he used to be a rat, he raced at it, only to smash into the wall.
“Hex! Slow down! Shhh!” Daniel beckoned Ben and Astrid over. “I think his voice box has a loose connection.”
Astrid grabbed one of her tools, dashed over, and waved it in front of his eyes. In a calm, soothing tone, she said, “I just need you to open wide.”
Hex glanced around. He understood. Nervously he opened his huge, gaping, bearlike maw and let the girl poke around inside—
The clicks and growls of spastic Mendese spewed out. “What have you done to me?” Hex cried. “My kids won’t recognize me!”
It wasn’t what Daniel had been expecting to hear. “You have kids?”
“Yes, of course!”
“How many?”
“Three hundred!”
“Three hundred kids?”
Hex smoothed down his fur indignantly. “I am one hundred and sixty-seven years old, and a rat. We like to breed.”
“Erm, yes, not really a rat anymore. Sorry.”
Hex smashed around, trying to find a mirror, completely unaccustomed to dealing with such a bulky size. “What am I?” he demanded. “What am I?”
“No idea, just a bunch of pieces we found and threw together.”
Ben kept his distance. “That’s a pretty good skill, being able to speak Mendese,” he said. “How’s he taking it?”
“Not well,” Daniel said.
29
THE TRIAL OF DARIUS HUN
The skies over Toshka were filled with a huge array of Riggers, Junkadoos, and the really big core freighters that were too big to even consider a landing. The Equinox smoothly cut in between them, descending through the clouds toward a vast gray city, which had grown like a fungus out of the shells of previous vast gray cities.
Hovering above its assigned landing port, part of a complex of ports on the edge of a bustling market district, the long arms of the Equinox folded up over the Sphere, while its bulky landing gear extended out from underneath.
Daniel and Hex watched intently as a squad of senior Truth Seekers escorted Darius Hun from his holding cell to the planet’s surface. Outside the port complex, a massive crowd had gathered, though it wasn’t altogether clear whose side they were on.
In his familiar series of Mendese clicks, Hex said, “I think I’ll wait by the ship.”
“Darius Hun, your deception has been revealed. Your true identity exposed. You stand before this council to answer for your crimes, both numerous and egregious. Two hundred and sixteen charges, spanning thirty-one separate worlds.”
The Council of the Verdicti, like the many similar councils throughout the galaxy, consisted of nine senior Truth Seekers. The proceedings took place under a security dome, which allowed an audience to watch the events anywhere in the galaxy, while leaving the chamber isolated and unencumbered by distraction.
Darius Hun stood in the very middle of the chamber, confined inside an energy field, while the nine Verdicti, their armor bloodred in color, encircled him.
Daniel sat transfixed, though in truth he understood very little about how the court worked. How could he? The Overseers had been anything but moral, or just. What he did know for certain was that the Truth Seekers who had captured Hun were not allowed to take part. As Ionica and Ben had explained, justice required those leading the trial to be “impartial,” whatever that meant. So twenty-seven Truth Seekers had been selected at random throughout the nearest star systems. Nine of them looked at all the evidence and charges leveled against Hun and defended him from them. Nine other Truth Seekers looked at the same evidence and prosecuted Hun. The last nine were assigned to the Council of the Verdicti, and it was their judgment, based on listening to the arguments, that would decide Hun’s fate.
It sounded impressive, but watching it unfold was a completely different experience. The entire trial had been a series of procedures and counter procedures, both technical and in many cases baffling. Perhaps one day Daniel would learn enough to fully understand how this system of justice worked, but for now everyone seemed to accept that this was simply how things were done.
Hun’s crimes stretched back many years. His actions on board the WaKeenee seemed fairly minor compared to the other things he had gotten up to. The circumstances of his capture were also odd; usually he had two or three escape plans, but not this time.
“It’s almost like he wanted to get caught,” Daniel remarked quietly to Ben and Ionica.
The two Truth Seekers remained silent, not giving any clue as to whether they agreed or disagreed with his theory.
The lead prosecuting Truth Seeker continued with his summation. “These indictments, in matters of larceny, bribery, and, ultimately, murder have been well documented. They constitute a willful pattern of destruction meted out upon the lives of thousands of innocent citizens, in multiple jurisdictions; his ultimate goal, personal gain at any cost. Members of this council, you have been presented with the evidence. It is time to render a verdict.”
At that moment, nine thin glass columns rose up out of the ground, encircling Darius Hun. For his part, the accused appeared singularly unmoved.
“You understand the charges brought against you?” one of the Verdicti asked.
“I do,” Hun replied.
“And yet you still plead guilty?”
Darius Hun turned around to face his questioner. A brief smile tugged at his lips. “Very, very guilty, your honor.”
Another Verdicti spoke up. “Do you have anything to add in your defense?”
“If it pleases the court,” Hun mused. “I have much to say, if you’re willing to indulge me.”
“It is not an indulgence,” the Verdicti replied. “This is your last opportunity to speak. It is imperative that you do so.”
Darius Hun turned around slowly, savoring the thrill of knowing that billions were watching him throughout the galaxy, even if he couldn’t see them. When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, he said, “War is coming.”
The Verdicti listened, but appeared unmoved.
“Something very ancient has become new again,” Hun explained, relishing this moment. “It is coming! For each and every one of you, there will be no mercy unless you bow down and pledge yourself before the Sinja! The Guild of Truth? You will be the first to fall! For your truth is powerless!”
The Verdicti silenced the chamber, allowing only the visual image of Darius Hun ranting and raving, spittle flying from his mouth.
One by one the Verdicti stepped forward, placing their hands on the ends of the glass columns in front of them, turning them from clear to red.
When the ninth was lit, a single Verdicti spoke for them all. “Darius Hun,” she said, “you have been found guilty. You are hereby exiled to Felonis for the rest of your natural days.”
And with that, the Verdicti filed out of the security dome, leaving Darius Hun to his raving.
“Your honors!” Ionica politely called out when they entered the public viewing chambers. She scrambled down from her seat, leaving Daniel and Ben behind. “My name’s Ionica Lux, and I petitioned for a private conference with the Verdicti. Have you had time to consider the petition?” she said, her small frame dwarfed by the great leaders towering over her.
The Verdicti, their clothing rapidly changing color from ceremonial r
ed back to the steely gray worn by all other Truth Seekers, considered her question.
“We have,” one of them said. “But how do you know the boy is not lying?”
“I don’t,” Ionica said. “But I think that he believes what he is telling me is true.”
“He may well believe every word of it,” the Chief Verdicti remarked. “Even Darius Hun believes he is just. But belief alone does not make something just or true.”
“We’re Truth Seekers,” Ionica reminded them. “Isn’t it our duty to determine that for ourselves?”
The Chief Verdicti sighed. “I have already instructed the Guild to conduct a cursory investigation into some of the claims. We shall call upon you both when we have made a determination.”
“Thank you, your honors,” she said.
When they had filed out, Daniel jumped out of his chair. “I don’t understand, what are they questioning?”
“Daniel, this is huge,” Ionica explained, trying to sound as though she knew how to be patient. “Right now, the Verdicti have to be one hundred percent certain that your story bears any truth.”
“To heck with caution!” said Daniel. “I just need a bunch of you guys to come back with me and free my friends.”
“Daniel, it’s not that simple.”
“Why isn’t it that simple?” he snapped.
“How do we know you’re not leading us into a trap?”
Daniel didn’t even begin to understand that line of reasoning. Why would he want to do that? What made them even think that? And then the realization hit him in the gut.
When the conference began a little while later, standing at the center of the Chief Verdicti’s office, Daniel just came right out and said what they were all thinking. “I’m not a Sinja,” he said.
The Chief Verdicti leaned against her long desk. “Do you even know what a Sinja is?”
Daniel shrugged. “I know you’re afraid of them.”
The objections and disquiet around the room were tempered only by the Chief Verdicti’s no-nonsense response. “Truth Seekers do not fear the Sinja. We fear only what can happen when they gain control of those who are easily led, like that fool Darius Hun,” she said, folding her arms. “But that still does not answer my question.”