Ember’s Echo
By D.C. Clemens
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
But Madame Bad Luck soberly comes
And stays — no fancy has she for flitting
-John Hilton Hay
Chapter One
It was just another guilt-ridden dream, except the memories it held were real, at least, most of them were. The first clear flashback actually occurred last. She was crying in the living room of her apartment, her head sunken low as she sat on the edge of her tanned couch. Her pale hands covered her face, hiding the softness of her features and the storm churning beneath. I could hear myself telling her that is was over between us, explaining it was for the best for both our futures. I hated the sound of the robotic words as they left my dry throat. Still, my monotone voice kept blathering away, as if I was giving a presentation in a dull business meeting for the hundredth time.
A flash of light presented a much different scene, one that allowed a calmness to completely seep into me. I saw her laughing as the ocean waves caressed the white shore behind her, the creamy rays of the brilliant sun shimmering off of her silky smooth skin. This was our fifth date, the day I first realized I was falling in love with her. No matter what world she was on, her attachment with the beach never faltered. It was the only place beyond the comforts of home that I had known her to let loose both her dark, luscious hair and her otherwise reserved nature. I had not been to a beach since I walked out her door.
Three or four more vague memories of our time together raced in succession before they settled on a longer recollection. It was of the last time I visited her family, making it nearly four months ago. While many would not consider aunts, nieces, friends, and twice removed cousins as immediate family, the same could not be said of hers. The tight-knit group would celebrate any mildly noteworthy occasion in the most majestic fashion. I believe my final visit was for a cousin’s college graduation at her aunt’s high-rise apartment, the primary site for these revelries. I could first see some partygoers standing on the trimmed lawn, which was an emerald blanket for the thousand square foot balcony. I could also feel a breeze kindly escort the brimming aroma of two dozen delectable entrees to everyone inside and out. Swaying in this enriched wind were some lavender Japanese maples that hugged the squat stone wall, which was the only barrier precluding a four hundred foot drop to the bustling city street. But there was someone missing from this extravagant affair. Unlike all the other imageries that had come before it, I could not see exactly where I was. Rather, it was as if I was viewing the space from an overhead drone zipping to and fro, programmed to stalk its master’s allies for reasons unknown.
In a puff, all thoughts about myself evaporated when her radiating face separated itself from the crowd. I tried to call out to her, but I could not make an impact in this realm. I could only watch as she promenaded through the joyful multitude to make her way up the marble staircase. Her solitary stroll brought her to an empty hallway. A short walk later brought her in front of one of the guestrooms, the last of a long line, where I then remembered I had been waiting to meet her. A rush of tender passion swept over me when I recalled what we did up there while the sun’s dying rays peeped through the white window drapes. I could sometimes still feel her delicate fingers stroking different parts of my skin as her moist, plump lips pressed themselves onto mine.
The syrupy feeling coursing my disembodied self was rudely replaced by mild confusion. She looked different from what I remembered. Her hair seemed shorter, and I was sure I only had to crudely remove a strapless red dress, not the brown leather jacket, white top, tight jeans, and the yellow scarf. Ultimately, this was a needed reminder that this was a dream, where details were often improvised. When I really thought about it, even waking memories were not immune to some degree of improvisation. As soon as an experience endures only as a memory, it steadily becomes muddled and masquerades as a lesser truth. For a moment, I thought her replica was sharing in my thoughts, as her hand remained motionless on the knob, but she soon turned it and walked through, shutting the door behind her.
Just as I was wondering how I could compel my intangible self to enter that room once more, a blood curling shriek sprang from her room, repressing all the music, singing, laughter, and murmuring voices. Its horrible, cold echo enveloped around whatever part of my psyche was watching. The elation in the floor eroded until even the mirthful children became silenced. Never before had I ever heard her scream with such ferocity. I tried with all my will to release myself from my static state and rush inside to know what had tortured her heart so much, not daring to guess it myself, but the edges of my reverie began to blur and fade away. The sounds, too, became slurred and jumbled. The last thing I could make out was her parents running up the stairs and opening the door, but the hazed environment and shrinking picture deterred any chance to see the scene inside. With the prevailing, eerie silence from those below, I could just hear her anxious mother ask, “What’s wrong, Sadie?! What happened?” before I completely went deaf and blind to this distorted dominion.
My stubborn eyes opened to return me back to the waking world, but my ears were still reverberating her horrified scream. According to the permanent clock stirring in my head, I had only slept an hour, but I was no longer tired. I knew dreams were not true depictions of memory; they were merely twisted manifestations of the emotional past and nothing more. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. The first portrayals of my nocturnal trance were almost entirely accurate, which just happened to make that last segment feel more real than it really was. In the end, all it did was make me feel guiltier about leaving her. But it wasn’t as if I had a plethora of options to choose from. Of all the impractical scenarios I had imagined, only two were realistic; it was either end the relationship or make her into a soldier’s wife. In a way, it was a choice between giving her a short-term anguish or long-term anxiety, and that’s granting if I lived long enough to regard it as long-term, which was an even worse notion to put her through. Ultimately, I could not stomach envisioning her waiting for me to come home, sitting alone night after night. She did not deserve to live in perpetual apprehension, not when she still had over two centuries of life to live.
Shit. It was only supposed to last that one night. I can still recall wandering into that throwaway bar, my pied uniform magnetizing every woman’s eye to me as I went to order my drink. She was just supposed to become another blurred conquest to tell my compatriots once I returned from my R&R. I had never thought I would find someone so cultured and down-to-earth so far away from Earth.
I was mulling over all the times I saw my ever restless mother concerned about my father’s latest tour of duty, when a call came through my thought-comm. Seeing as it was from my superior, this call would have automatically stirred me awake if I was still asleep.
“You awake, greenhorn?” he asked me when I accepted the wireless hail.
Though I was long accustomed to hearing someone else’s voice within my own mind, nothing could have prepared me for the first time it happened. I was five years old—the inaugural age when basic microtechnological features were permitted to be inoc
ulated—when I downloaded the program. Tears were spilling from my puffy red eyes after being treated with the comforting voices of my parents inside my head. The initially bizarre experience had me feeling like a human pretending to be a machine, or possibly the other way around. I afterwards vowed to myself that I would never cry again, a pledge I broke only days later when a spider scared me.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, a bit more gravely than I would have liked.
Noting the sober tone, he asked, “Ghosts keeping you up?”
I snickered to myself, thinking how old memories were similar to homeless ghosts haunting the depths of the mind. Then an echo of her shrill cry infiltrated the waking world.
“Not anymore, sir.”
It was just a dream.
Chapter Two
My superior set aside pleasantries and we both flipped a switch that stripped away our civilian selves. I may have looked the same, shared the same name, conveyed the same voice, but a soldier replaced all else. Following protocol, I hurried out my assigned room and headed for the roof a story above me, where a transport was waiting. As we were heading off-world, there was no need to don the armor and equipment locked away in my room, wearing only the standard gray uniform no one liked.
I was joined by one of my alien comrades on my way to the stairs. She was a talorian named Briannika, whom I had recently replaced as the greenest member of our Parliamentary Search and Rescue Squad. For a brief moment I wondered what it was like to be born anew in a nearly fully prosthetic body like hers, a body not completely one’s own. Due to her artificial physique, she was not required to wear the standard grays, so long as the streaking comet, our emblem, remained stamped to her chest plate. Even much of Briannika’s bare, glossy figure had her looking as if she was eternally wearing a type of light armor. This was further emphasized by the fact that talorians were obligated to wear helmets on oxygen-based atmospheres, the type breathed by most of the influential species in the Nimbus galaxy. In addition to the frail physiques of her kind, talorians typically had low vida reserves, making them poor arcanists. So to better compete with the warriors of other galactic species, an attitude that was also spreading to the civilian segment, it was a virtual necessity for them to enhance their forms with advanced plastics and metals.
I wasn’t particularly the talkative type, preferring to let others take the lead socially, so much of what I knew about Briannika and my other comrades came from their public accounts on the net. On matters concerning their personal lives, Briannika matched the nature of most of her brethren; reclusive. Even as a fellow comrade-in-arms she hadn’t allowed me into her private profile. To be fair, I hadn’t yet requested the access to see the details of her reticent past. From what I gathered, our squad plucked Briannika up after our captain witnessed her varied skills firsthand during a rescue mission to a talorian outpost. It was all I needed to know about her. For the time being, we gave one another a polite nod and continued up the stairway, our innermost thoughts staying a secret.
Half a moment afterward and we were on the roof of the seventy-story government building. There we gazed on what could arguably be labeled as the most ugly-ass shuttle in existence. The faded red coating peeling off of its rugged rectangular frame made it look like some ancient clay brick, a brick that helped cover up a tomb. The transport that had undoubtedly seen the worst of what many foreign worlds had to offer had been built by a draken manufacturer to withstand the harshest of planetary conditions. It was a success in that respect. The bulky craft had descended from the orbiting mother ship and was touching down on its bottom corner thrusters using its autopilot feature, though there were manual controls for a more hands-on approach. I was told the captain enjoyed taking full advantage of the pilot option when the opportunity presented itself. Offsetting the tarnished shuttle were two sleek cylindrical pods secured on each side of the vehicle, each holding an open-air speeder.
At the back end of the moment, we were joined by the remainder of our squad not already orbiting within the chief ship. As was typical, Emery and Fife were heard before they were seen. Never able to comprehend the notion of silent meditation, their opinions did not reside in themselves for long, whether it was asked of them or not. Mostly the latter. They were of the feline-like grimalkin species and technically cousins, but the inseparable pair could easily be thought of as conjoined twins considering how important family was to them. They not only believed blood was thicker than water, but that blood was the only form of water they would ever need. Their child-like excitement on starting their next assignment was conveyed in their spritely steps and the back and forth whipping of their lengthy tails. They were currently articulating to themselves their delight in receiving just enough sleep for the journey. Still, even if they had been awake for ten weeks straight, I was certain they would have been stating just how much they had accomplished over that time. No greater optimists had I ever met. Initially, it was only thanks to the digital identifying markers displayed in my eyes that I was able to prevent myself from being confused about who was which. More recently, I began effectively differentiating them by spotting the marginal differences in the black stripes lining their faces, which stretched along the rest of their spry bodies. Though grimalkins did not carry the ability, I had a mild impulse to lean over and hear if they were purring, but one of the ways a human could get on the bad side of a grimalkin was to treat one, even lightheartedly, like a cat.
Lieutenant Brent Henring was the last to join us on the roof assembly. His robust presence never needed a verbal broadcast to be noticed. He was a fellow human and in the prime of his life at 201 years old, with most of that life spent working in the military in some capacity. While the captain’s right hand man was soft-spoken at any other time, his burly voice carried great weight when he handed down orders, his thick black beard unable to muffle the words any. If it wasn’t for his anchoring company, I would have likely shirked my chance at joining the alien organization.
The crude shuttle screeched opened its reinforced side door. Taking its noisy cue to enter, we boarded the dimly lit craft, having to listen to the deafening clatter a second time when the door closed behind me. The harsh sound was replaced by the violent shaking of the thrusters lifting the impatient shuttle, which was enough to cease the talking of the chatty cousins. To be assured we were not going to be spun and dazed by the end of our flight, we strapped ourselves to the seats lining the walls before the rocking became too bruising. From the porthole window, I saw us quickly ascend over Nuest, the human colony world we were stationed on. Below us was a sprawling metropolis of skyscraper clusters, spiraling skytowers a mile high, and strips of greenery for two miles around. The sight of towering, glittering edifices on formerly barren worlds enthralled me more than any lush forest or crystalline ocean ever could. It told a story of just how far my kind had progressed and hinted at greater undertakings to come. The city below vanished behind thickening clouds the higher we rose, until it was completely obscured by distance and vapor.
And so officially began my first mission on my new job. It was just a few months ago, a month before doing the cruelest thing I had ever done, when I was first presented with the idea of applying for the cross-species organization. My previous superior encouraged the act, knowing full well my interest in working with other species. This sentiment was unlike many humans—or many species, for that matter—who preferred being among their own kind, even after over two hundred years of galactic familiarization. I did not mind formally aligning myself with Parliament, and actually hoped to serve for their prestigious Galactic Guard when my skills and loyalty were recognized. It was not something easily achieved, but the possibility was there. I suppose I was enthusiastic about my career.
A wave of words, numbers, and pictures began to appear before my mind’s eye as the operation briefing downloaded into my brain’s cybertech, which consisted of the typical assortment of nanobots introduced to most galactic citizens and all military personnel. Those with the tec
hnology were permitted to experience a certain amount of downloaded data as if it were a new memory. This fresh memory told me we were to head to a recently discovered world, known officially as 2X79-K and informally as “Ember,” where a group of fifty-seven archaeologists and eighteen of their protectors had not given their daily update in the last three days. They were there to study some ancient ruins of an unknown species lost over twelve hundred years ago. According to the report, communication had always been touch and go on the planet, so it was possible, and hopeful, they were simply experiencing severe technical difficulties. Pirates and looters were a possibility, of course, but considered somewhat unlikely at the moment. The prep work for the dig was kept confidential until the archaeological mission was deemed ready, giving potential plunderers little time to reach the world without resistance. Celestial maps also revealed the planet closely bordered the territorial advok species of the Ispen Imperium. This was among a handful of borders in the galaxy where even the most desperate of criminals would not dare venture for long, lest they become forsaken fodder for the clandestine species. Actually, it was considered a minor miracle our archaeologists were allowed to explore a world this close to their Imperium’s boundaries to begin with, but it appeared Parliament and the Coalition had worked everything out with them. Our team was sent to confirm what the trouble was.
As I set aside the report to conjure up for another time, a yellowish light gleaming through the window caught my attention. Otherwise enclosed by the vast darkness, my captain’s frigate came into view. It was reflecting the sunlight provided by this system’s star like the temporary moon it was. It had the same stalwart build as our shuttle and its red veneer was equally as tarnished. The larger than average frigate might have been mistaken as a derelict junkyard were it not for its four broad wings jutting straight out the stern, two stacked on each side, and each carrying one of the four oversized propulsion engines at their center. To be fair to our captain’s vessel, no draken ship was ever designed to be aesthetically pleasing. I couldn’t even be sure if they ever went through the trouble of designing in the first place. Yet, for anyone being rescued by this unsightly mess, she would match any goddess of splendor. On its tapered bow were a series of seemingly random scratches across its already smeared surface. They were, in actuality, the foreign letterings of the draken. The Tongues of Fire program downloaded into the language center of my brain granted me the ability to instantly decipher any known alien vocabulary, either spoken or written. It thus allowed me to translate this script to read “Wanderer.”
Ember's Echo (The Nimbus Collection Book 2) Page 1