by Grant Fausey
TALES
OF THE
MASTER-BUILDERS
GRANT FAUSEY
FAUSCLAN ENTERTAINMENT, LLC
ALSO BY GRANT FAUSEY
–––––––––––––––
ALPHA TRACK
SKELLON EMPIRE
WIZARD WORKS
HEAVY ARMOR
CHARLIE THE CAVEMAN
FUTURE COURSE
ENFORCE
THE FAMILY GOOPS
U. L. T. R. A.
EYE OF THE MACHINE
THE ANTIQUITY
OF CRIMSON INDIGO
POINTS OF ORIGIN
SHADOWRIDER
THE LAST OF THE MAGNIFICENT MACHINES
THE HUMAN WARS
SAMUEL NOMAD’S
NEW AMERICA
OF CRIMSON INDIGO
MARAUDERS OF THE BLACK SUN
THE RETURN
OF CRIMSON INDIGO
THE RETURN OF CRIMSON INDIGO
A MERE DROP OF SUNSHINE
THE CHRISTMAS AUCTION
Copyright © 2017 by Grant Fausey
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ISBN: 9781521282564
ASIN: B073RTS9Q9
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number:
Fausclan Entertainment rev date:
Cover art: Grant Fausey
For Sara, Haru and Maya, Momoko and Jason
Travis, Amy, and Echo
Tatiana and Arrow
Katrina and Kelvin
And, of course, Ramona
My Fausclan....
NOTICE:
All men, alien beings, and worlds in this story
are imaginary. Any coincidence of location, personality
or name is not intended and is, of course, regretted.
TALES
OF THE
MASTER-BUILDERS
At any moment in time, the future can unravel the duplicity with which we define our own existence. Yet, somehow love survives even propels us from one existence to another, across multiple lifetimes and alternate realities to where new consciousness takes form. The course chosen is often the one of least resistance, or the avenue with which we see the end of our involvement. But on occasion, the subject of the dilemma is more often the beginning and not the end of our relationship, or the understanding of what brought us here in the first place. Put simply: What happened before will happen again—it's inevitable.
Samuel Nomad, Temporal Agent
IT WAS A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE WAS YOUNG,
AND THE LIGHT WAS UPON US ALL…. REMEMBER
––– 1 –––
THE THIRD UNIVERSE
THIRD DIMENSION
The world was different, silent; a cold-hearted menagerie of otherworldly life forms that resulted in a resurgence of eco-conscious individuals, most of whom had prospects on what changed reality, not the why. Temporal incursions developed here as common as root-weed and just as plentiful. Although for the Manchi clan it seemed a life-changing event. Considering that Jerolda Manchi was a local; the twin-tail Oleander and his granddaughter had simply taken up the position of guide, and were simply along for the trip.
“What do you see?” Asked Relix, the smaller of the two Trods leaned over and froze. The ground beneath his feet rumbled, the movement catching him off guard. If not for the Root-weed dangling from his mouth rolling from side-to-side between his teeth. One might have thought he was a statue. Apart from the headphones he had for ears, the young archeologist looked more like the statue of a turtle than the founder of civilization. His mysterious counterpart, on the other hand, found it hard to stand erect even though he was bipedal; his hands being where his legs should be and vise versa.
"Move over, will you,” Relix exclaimed. “I can't see..."
"Will you shut up and throw over a line," rebutted Tee. For the last time, he was in a hurry.
The young archeologist jumped back and screamed, stunned by the spectacle as he questioned his counterpart’s sanity. Before him, across the expanse of the convergence lay their destination, a world of floating island landmasses loosely held together by the force of reduced gravity. Reality shifted slightly, out of sink with the rest of the universe. Relix and Tee were here to find out why. For all he knew, the Cretaceous period ended with an abrupt shift in reality, exfoliating in as many full bloom green and red striped plants as his counterpart had goose bumps on his scaly skin.
"Do you know how high we are?" He asked trembling. Tee didn't answer. Not that he remembered the how or why they too had first set foot on Sodin, but cliff diving wasn’t one of them. He knew that for sure. Hence, his painstaking attention to caution; he just stood there nose-to-nose with Relix, intolerant listening to the Trod’s gibberish managing to find its way into the airwaves as part of the high-pitched shrill he managed to squeak out. There was no way he was going anywhere near the edge of a damn bluff!
"You can't be serious," he shouted with a glare. "I don't have enough line to...." He stopped mid-sentence. If Tee thought for one minute he would simply throw a line over, and step off a cliff; he had another thing coming. Relix wasn’t stupid.
Jerolda Manchi interrupted. Relix obviously felt a resurgence of anxiety, frightened by the sheer thought of going over the edge. What if he fell, or ran out of cable. It was truly a consideration; he manufactured the web-like filament, but holy crap. His voice crackled, adding an audible sharpness to the appearance of his physical extremities. His radar eye widened full open.
"You are serious!" He shouted, holding his ground. It didn’t do a bit of good. Tee never took no for an answer. It wasn’t his way. After all, he was the Alpha Male, not that he had anything to do with being male. Trods were unisex. Simply manufactured. Biomechanical entities produced as scientific investigators in the service of the Industries.
Tee calculated the distance, stepped back from the edge and groaned, waiting for Relix to do his limitless calculations. The Trod considered all the variables, double-checked his figures on distance, altitude and trajectory then repeated the process.
“Well––?” queried Tee.
Relix did answer. He merely considered responding. A hundred variables danced in his head, accounting for the movement of each hunk of land as if it was a steppingstone across a river.
Tee on-the-other-hand pulled the multi-purpose pod off his back, and opened the pack. There was a loud click!
Relix took a deep breath. Tee hooked the end of the cord to his line then handed it off to his companion, connecting the device to the end of Relix's cord.
"How far do you think it is to the ruins?" h
e asked
"Twenty-seven, point two miles," responded Tee, recounting his own calculations.
"Miles?" Asked Relix. "What the dickens are miles?"
"They're measurements, you bub!" mumbled the Trod. Tee was the larger of the two bipeds, and needed to consider his own set of variables. Especially, when playing with his companion’s nervous-nelly syndrome. "Then it shouldn't take us to long to get there,” he added, half smiling at the little biped.
Relix’s face suddenly slammed tightly to the rock face applying ample pressure against the ledge to keep him from sliding off the edge.
"No––" he muttered.
"Good–– Then let's get going!" The turtle-shaped creature tugging on the line, bounced once then twice checking the line, then dropped over the edge; his hand-like feet steadying him against the cliff-side, while Relix flew over the ridge like a counter-weight, dangling midway between Jerolda Manchi and the cliff face.
His feet finally struck ground, plowing across the sandy surface to the other side of the ridge, where he helplessly dropped over the rim, letting himself down to the surface of another landmass. He looked rather like a circus act in training, although Jerolda Manchi made him look truly comical to the real inhabitants of Rampia.
The Oleander slid down the line, hand-over-hand until he reached the bottom, and released his telltale yoke from the line. The land appeared to be pried apart, as if separated by the hands of God. Yet, the underside of the island was tapered in curved mounds, woven tightly into a tapestry as old as the planet. Rampia was more a failed experiment in evolution then a deliberate diversion, the Rampia Sodin interchange had simply split apart and was discarded.
As far as Tee could tell, the world was a dust ball covered in untold secrets, alive with a frail contingent of inhabitants that scurried about the ground, growling in the wind. The mystery was larger than Jerolda or any of the Manchi clan was privy too. Relix was too busy having a heart attack to realize even the tiniest bit of information. The only thing on his mind was kissing the ground, when he found it again, never mind the pair of otherworldly eyes watching him from a vantage point at the edge of the sky. She was protected by the curve of the rim.
High above the burning core of the planet, among the smallest of the floating otherworldly masses, a camouflaged rider on dragon back reined the creature to a halt. The beast's biomechanical head bellowed blackened smoke like an old blast furnace in need of repair. Its rider, a young dark–haired woman in her early twenties, scanned the drifting rocks with a sort of sophisticated viewing device. Its wide beam fit tightly to her brow, cushioned snugly to her face allowing the curve of the long pointed end to depress lightly into the cups of her hands. The machine beeped and she pulled it from her face, dropping it along her side. The device bounced softly against the rough leather of her body armor and floated near her waist.
Her appearance was more machine than woman; a thick combat armor layered in folds and outfitted with an arrangement of biomechanical appendages followed the contours of her body. But underneath that armor, she was beautiful; her long, silky black hair glistening as did her eyes, alternating between shades of jade, and emerald green. The wind swept across her face, brushing its harsh panting against her brow, while the breeze lifted her hair from her shoulders, gliding it along the currents of the air over her armor to wrap around her chest, only to be reflected in the viewing device's highly polished surfaces.
The scanner hummed, adjusting in micro movements with the whine of perfectly matched gears. The young woman looked to the sky, past the mountains that hovered in the heavens, to the trail of a tiny swept-wing fighter as it traveled beyond the great pass that bridged the universes. The metallic wedge maneuvered through the mountainous flows of lush green land, appearing and disappearing like a needle passing through a woven tapestry until finally, a whisper of her voice broke the roar of the hot desert wind.
"Maccon," she beckoned. "We've a couple more on the north ridge. Looks like they're heading for the old ruins."
"All right..." answered a sharp voice in response. The man’s voice echoed from somewhere beyond the confines of Jolland's communicator, as if he was a ghost. "Keep an eye on them. I'll send a Tripodal to intercept them at the west gate of the spaceport. We don't have time for this, but we can't chance them coming to harm, either."
"They're heading for the old ark, aren't they?" Maccon agreed, but Jolland already knew the answer. She had seen the transport land only hours ago and witnessed its demise. Half the vehicle suffered catastrophic failure, while the other half glistened in the noonday sun.
"I’m not sure where they came from," she continued. "But they're most likely off that planet rig. They're probably lost."
"I don't think so," Maccon answered, his voice echoing through the wind, not her communicator. He was close, but she couldn’t see him. "The crew moved the rig to the far side of the planet overnight and it's not company practice to leave any of the ground crew behind. Nevertheless, we'd better get these newcomers off-world as soon as possible, or they could find themselves trapped here during the convergence."
“Understood,.” The young woman took the reins of the flying beast in hand, and nudged the steed forward into a gallop. Its biologically engineered talons dug deep into the protruding rocks, and found safe harbor in an otherwise dangerous terrain.
The lizard pivoted sharply, plunging over the edge of the ridge, while staying close to the rim. Sarah Jolland leaned forward and slipped silently through the air, jockeying her position allowing the beast's leathery wings to open fully. Jolland’s heart pounded as she reined the beast upward, thrusting the creature upward on a course to the open sky; time was running out and her thoughts churned with limitless possibilities. Risk. Why save these two newcomers? The little creatures off the planet rig––there was a possibility, but their exposure to the conjunction would complicate matters. There was no need to take such a chance. All her life the young woman had believed in life; even when events regardless of their impact took the same amount of time to happen. Everything took time and needed to be looked at in every possible light, at every possible angle. How else could she see all the sides of what it was she was looking at?
Still, she figured her father had his reasons. The project was important––vital to the future of Rampia. The planet was taking on a new shape and was already showing signs of its new matrix, evolution-taking root again. The ruins of the old world were more than remnants of a civilization that thrived on Rampia.
Jolland pulled the beast’s reins to the right, banked in a circular descent. She knew Rampia was once an asset of the vast empire created by the Industries, but now it was something else. Something lifeless; its landmarks littered the ground.
The truth lay hidden in the land in subtle ways it reflected earlier achievements. Jolland knew it wasn't home any longer, but she couldn't help but feel she was still a part of its heritage. Perhaps she wasn’t genetically engineered, or a technological milestone like the living machines on the surface, but she was a new breed of replicant. It was a time of change and, thankfully, not the way the Industries intended. Reunification started somewhere, so why not the center of the universe … it seemed logical. The future of the galaxy was at stake, and only pain and suffering could spread beyond the boundaries of the border worlds if it was let to the Industrials. Maccon had other plans though; the restoration of the human race was top of his list.
Machine society was ingenious, thought Jolland. Replication wasn’t merely the backlash at humanity that caused the chain of events; it was evolutionary and eventually the cause of the of mankind's collapse. A single decade didn’t seem like a long time; especially, at the end, the machines simply took control crippling every avenue of escape. Man was steadily replaced by a newer version of human biology.
Jolland knew she was a part of it for nearly a decade; Maccon challenged her with his teachings, her skills and knowledge worthy of galactic royalty. Jolland, however, considered herself anything but
royalty. She knew the time would come when truth of her existence would shed light on the secrets Maccon bestowed upon her. But it would take a miracle to pry the simplest explanation from him in the meantime. She loved him though, even understood where he was coming from, but there was more to the chain of events than just a systematic lying out of the operation. The truth was suppressed and the corporate mega machine used wealth and power to extremes. The signs were all too evident, even though the future held promise in the eyes of the two little Trods out for a Sunday stroll.
Five hundred feet below her, Tee stood alongside boulders of mangled metal, shadowed by a second column of wind etched stone. Like a page out of a storybook, nothing seemed real. It was as if the artifacts of some untold fable had come to life. Jerolda Manchi, on the other hand, peaked around the twisted metal of a third support pillar to see nothing … nothing but the distinct sounds of heavy equipment. An industrial complex with machinery in use, he thought. The place was anything but dead. The surface was a silent of course, a delusion. He hated to admit it, but had no choice. He had indeed found the clue.
"Which way?" he asked.
Jerolda stepped out, standing in the middle of a cobblestone runway. He looked both ways, expected some sort of traffic, ghostly or otherwise. The place looked abandoned, but was anything but dead.
Tee squinted, put a hand to his brow. The Oleander shrugged. "Follow your instincts––" he said calmly, pointing in no obvious direction. There really wasn't an answer, only guesses; besides, his view was obscured––A large ridge of rock formed both sides of the cobblestone runway.