by Aaron Frale
Regardless of the history of her name, Da was dead because her family was dead. Hak was dead because her village was dead. She buried Da’Hak with the memories of the people she had lost. However, there was one memory that she never wanted to let go. It was her mother’s. Her mother gave her the first name of Kal after a wise prophet from the stories of legend. She kept the name Kal because that was the only thing left from her mother. She would keep her mother alive by keeping her name. When the time came to change her identity and create a fake one in the system, she stuck with Kal. Her official name was Kal Arjan, according to her IDs. She grew up on a station not too far from her home world of Nigramoto in a territory that was not quite controlled by the Shusharshian collective or the UPE.
When the people of Earth scanned the fake identchip implanted into her arm, it came up with the fiction of her life. At first, she was nervous, like the rest of the crew. She expected that the Teristaques would scan her DNA, and they would know Kal’Da’Hak had not died in prison but was alive on Earth. However, the DNA privacy laws were pretty clear. They couldn’t scan her DNA unless she gave them a reason. She wasn’t going to break any laws, yet.
Hayden had the worst time on Earth. At first, it seemed like he was doing well. He was glad to be back, and he seemed most excited by the food chains only located on Earth. Kal found most Earth food quite unremarkable, except for the Kansas City barbecue. She had to try it after hearing Sarge talk about it with such reverence. She was impressed. However, the most interesting part was how close it was to banjer meat with a sauce prepared by her village. It was the closest to home she had felt in a while.
Being close to home was what eventually wore down Hayden. Once the thrill of eating food he had grown up with had worn off, he missed his family. His father and brother were a short tube ride away from Albuquerque. However, Hayden could not visit them. According to the records from the prison, he was dead. As long as he stayed dead, they were safe. If he had visited his family, no matter how many precautions he took, there was a chance that he would be discovered. If Hayden was discovered to be alive, then how many of the prisoners who were considered dead in the haul breaches of the prison were also alive?
Hayden became increasingly miserable knowing that his family was so close, and there was nothing he could do about it. The months were hard for him, and he was overjoyed to hear the news that they had discovered the location of the ship. It was easier for Hayden to know that he couldn’t visit because they were lightyears apart.
However, when Hayden became miserable, he was almost easier to deal with. He became super focused on the tasks at hand. He would not chit chat or talk with anyone. When something was bothering him, the Hayden who had convinced the entire crew to attend a movie night would disappear. He would no longer force an incredulous crew to eat an Earth dish called pizza. Grannork had been opposed to the existence of the dish called pizza in the beginning, but became its biggest supporter and always suggested it when they ate together. Hayden did not rejoice in his success of converting the crew to pizza like he normally would.
While the all-business Hayden was easier to deal with, the fun Hayden was missed by the crew, and Kal wanted to get off this world as soon as possible. There were too many memories for Hayden and too much danger for her crew. Rough outposts at the edges of the unexplored part of the galaxy were comfortable. They knew how to navigate the underworld. Earth had been a challenge in ways they didn’t expect. For Hayden, the challenge had been the reminder that his life before prison was gone, and there was nothing he could do to get it back.
To keep Hayden’s mind off his family, Kal decided they would infiltrate the storage facility together. Another reason for keeping Hayden close was that Maker had alerted her to the fact that they might have a traitor in the crew. One of the crew was making trips outside their designated search areas. One trip could be as simple as sightseeing, but several to the same city were suspicious. Kal wanted to keep her most trusted crew member close to her.
Since the storage facility was an expensive place, they needed to exude expensive tastes. Hayden dressed in a wild purple suit with even crazier hair. Kal, on the other hand, wore a business skirt, button-up shirt, blazer, and glasses. Her hair was down and styled, which felt odd on the side of her face as she was used to no-nonsense hair pulled back in a ponytail. Grannork had come with them. He had large sunglasses and a leather jacket.
Hayden led them into the storage facility where they all fell into their roles as soon as the sales associate with a thin tie and wide smile approached. “Are you sure this is the place?” Hayden put on a fake Martian accent. “It looks so dirty.”
“I assure you it is the best in the city,” Kal said in the meek voice of a personal assistant just trying to do her best.
The sales associate quickly surmised that Hayden was in charge and stuck out his hand in greeting. “Welcome to The Vault, how can I…”
Grannork, playing the part of the bodyguard, stepped in front of the man walking towards Hayden. All Grannork had to do to play the bodyguard was look mean, which was something he did when he wasn’t trying, so it wasn’t much of a stretch.
“It’s ok, let the man pass,” Hayden said, and Grannork moved aside. “You know how Orcandus can get a little overzealous. But what they lack in social graces is made up tenfold in loyalty.”
“Yes, very good,” the sales associate said. “I did want to mention that our cleanliness…”
“Yes, yes,” Hayden waved the man off. “I’m sure it’s all good and proper, but do you have something that will fit my needs? I need quite a bit of storage.”
“I can check. What do you intend to store?”
“You don’t know? You don’t know!” Hayden exploded with mock offense.
Grannork grunted, and Kal stepped into the situation and spoke to the sales associate in hushed tones, “I know he can be a pain in the ass. Not everyone has the same taste as their grandparents.”
Kal said the last part loud enough for Hayden to hear her, and that sent him into a fresh set of rants. “My art is in the civic centers of many capitals throughout the known…”
She turned to the clerk and pulled him away from the raving artist, “He is a sculptor, one of the best in the galaxy. It’s a good thing statues don’t talk, or you’d have to put up with him all day. Am I right?”
The sales associate smiled and nodded. He looked nervously to Hayden, who’s ranting escalated to kicking and cursing. “If he doesn’t calm down, I’ll have to call security.”
Kal pulled the man away, and said, “Don’t worry. He’ll calm down soon enough. Interstellar travel makes him grumpy. Now, we heard you were the ones to ask because we require an unusual storage situation. You see, sculptures don’t fit in regular holding, so we were looking for something big.”
“Yes, we do have all sizes of units.”
“I was thinking more the order of a warehouse.”
“A warehouse? If it’s a full-scale commercial enterprise, there are plenty of shipping companies.”
Hayden had calmed down to mumbling and muttering.
“We require a little more discretion. His last sculpture was sold to the Veban planetary embassy. I trust that you know they spare no expense. With a warehouse, things tend to go missing. Shipments are lost. We have our own vessel we’d use for delivery. We broker all the transactions. What we don’t have is a safe place to store them here on Earth. I trust you can help us with that.”
“We do have some units that have a port for a spaceship to dock. They are quite pricey, mind you.”
“Trust me when I say we’ll spare no expense.”
After some tough negotiation on Kal’s part, the sales associate agreed to show them a similar unit to the one where the prototype was most likely being stored. He took them up to the highest level of the building. The four of them packed themselves into an express elevator that shot up to the three-hundred-and-second floor. The sales associate had to use a gold key to access
the control panel. Kal noted that there were two more floors above their destination and a slot for another key. The storage facility was a small building, and she was sure that there were more than three hundred and four floors.
As the elevator slowed, their stomach lurched, and they swayed on their feet. The sales associate displayed no signs of discomfort whereas Kal felt disorientated for a moment. She hoped the man wouldn’t notice the split second of discomfort. A personal assistant for the rich and powerful would be used to express elevators.
The power of g-force acting on her when they’d take a shuttle down to a planet did little to prepare her for the strange G-force sensations in a room that wasn’t visibly moving. The Scitronite also didn’t prepare her as it had an artificial gravity field to protect the occupants from rattling around during flight. Most starships had microgravity generators and computers smart enough to compensate for all the twists and turns of combat flight. However, small crafts like shuttles and fighters usually didn’t have the capacity for a complex computer system and microgravity generators just to keep its occupants from feeling the effects of gravity and acceleration, unless of course, the owner of the shuttle didn’t care about maneuverability and fuel efficiency. A shuttle could always be weighted down with a large computer like the kind on a starship. Unlike the computers of the past where the technology shrunk with each generation, the computers in Kal’s time grew bigger with the complexity of the tasks they had to perform.
Computers had reached their microscopic limit as processors could go no smaller than an atom with the invention of quantum computing. Soon quantum computers were given tasks so monumental.They had trouble computing with a single atom acting as the processor. Thus more atoms were added, all working in tandem. Soon, room-sized computers of quantumly entangled atoms churning through infinite bits of data were used to process large, real-time information such as keeping a starship’s artificial gravity stable during a firefight.
The sales associate took them to a floor with four doorways, two to the east of the elevator on either side of the hallway and two to the west. The clerk began a well-rehearsed sales pitch. He didn’t seem to notice Kal’s brief moment of disorientation. “We have four units that make up the footprint of the upper floors. Each has a port for landing a private vessel. Our affordable options have room for a small shuttle, all the way up to a larger cargo vessel.”
He waved his hand at the northwest door, and it opened to a large storage space. “The door will be DNA coded and cannot be opened, even by members of our staff. The DNA record is confidential…”
Kal tuned out the rest of the sales pitch as she surveyed the space. The look was wrong. There was a port for a medium sized cargo vessel, and lots of space. The door for the ship was on the side of the building. The port she had seen in the photograph was on the roof. She cut off the sales representative. “We would feel safer with a vertical landing pad.”
The sales associate was ready with a response, “Ships that enter Earth’s atmosphere are required to use the autopilot network…”
“It’s not the piloting, but rather the ease of a competitor in the building across the street catching a glimpse inside and stealing a design before we reveal it to the universe. A vertical landing takes less time than a lateral one. Less time with the door open means less time to glimpse inside. Do you see our dilemma?”
“We have privacy screens we can set up around the landing pad…”
“Money is of no concern. I did see another key slot in the elevator.”
“It’s not about the money. I’d be happy to show you the top floor unit if I could. It’s just that it’s under a long-term contract.”
“This place is useless! I told you they would be of no help!” Hayden yelled and stormed away. Grannork followed him. The sales associate stepped back and forth looking at Kal and then at Hayden.
“He’ll be fine,” Kal said. “He just needs to cool down.”
Hayden and Grannork used his foul temper as an excuse to place themselves on different floors. That way they could get different measurements on the strength of the signal connecting to the prototype. If Maker had measurements from the ground floor, the middle floor, and one of the upper floors at the same time, he could calculate the position of the ship inside the building.
While Kal was sure it was on the top floor, the best plan to date involved renting out a unit on the level under it and finding a way to burrow through the ceiling. However, since she needed to stall the sales associate while the others got in position, she thought she’d pursue other options.
“Who owns the contract? At least give us the option to contact them about buying it out,” she asked.
“We value the privacy of our clients,” the sales associate said. “I can’t even tell you what units are rented out on this floor.”
“Could you at least give me a glimpse of the top floor unit’s hallway? Surely that’s not confidential?”
“I’m afraid the elevator opens up into the unit. It’s DNA locked in addition to the security key. If you need a top floor unit, we have a sister company in Chicago…”
“That’s ok. Tell me more about this unit,” Kal said as she feigned interest for the rest of the conversation. The clerk had given them all the information she needed. They didn’t need to break into a unit designed to keep people out. They needed to find a way to exploit the elevator. She received a signal through the ship interface; Grannork had been successful at gaining access to the middle floor while Hayden stayed in the lobby. The middle floors were accessible with an access code, and it was easy enough for a hulking creature like Grannork to look over a person’s shoulder while they entered their code.
Kal wrapped up the conversation with the sales associate and reconnected with the others on the ground floor when she saw a group of heavily armed Teristaques enter the lobby. They all had an insignia that she had not seen in a long time. They were Makiuarnek’s soldiers. They had slaughtered her village. The man who gave the order, he was at the front of the line. They were marching straight for the express elevator.
Kal was almost too dumbstruck to do anything but watch him walk by. Without thinking about it, she walked right up to the man. The questions blurted out by her companions felt like they were miles away. She lost all sense of where she was and became singularly focused. She stepped in front of the oncoming troops, and they stopped.
“Step aside,” one of the soldiers barked, and the whine of his weapon charging seemed to punctuate the command.
“Hold on,” Makiuarnek said and cupped his hand on her cheek. A chill went down her spine. “Do I know you? You seem familiar…”
Kal had rehearsed many times what she would say to Makiuarnek the next time she saw him. She had an entire scene mapped out in her mind. She had played the scene over and over. Now that he was here, she was at a loss of what to say. There weren’t any words that came to mind. Nothing could bring back her village and the fact that she held on to the hatred for so long was a disgrace to her people. They would forgive the man for their murders. She, however, could never forgive.
Before Makiuarnek could say another word, a blade ejected from her sleeve and pierced his armor. She aimed for his heart.
5
“The Taurilian blade is one of the few melee weapons that can pierce Teristaque armor. Human armor smiths infuse the black ore decrand into the plating, making it one of the toughest materials in existence,” the weapons dealer said as he took Kal to the back of his ship. The man was of a species with smooth skin, bright eyes, and sleek hair. Normally, she wouldn’t do business on another person’s vessel. They would find a neutral place to meet. It was easier to control the situation when no one had the advantage. If this man intended to screw her over, walking into his vessel would be dangerous.
However, there were several reasons why she went anyway. He was docked on a space station that had a fairly robust police force. While she tried to avoid authorities whenever she could, it was comforting
to know that they would like nothing more than to capture an arms dealer; the enemy of her enemy was her friend. Another reason was that he did have a reputation to uphold, and most successful businesses didn’t last very long by luring people to their vessels and robbing them. Lastly, weapons were outlawed on the station, and from a purely economic standpoint, it was easier for her to view the catalog, pick the one she wanted, and make him sort out the smuggling.
Sneaking the weapon on the station and back to where the ship docked was the easy part since she only intended on buying a melee weapon. His collection of handheld weapons was very impressive. There were all sorts of blades and bludgeoning weapons, both human and alien alike. Some had jagged blades that looked more like torture devices; others were smooth and thin. The Taurilian blade was long and needle-like and turned into a pyramid shape at the base. He handed it to Kal. She picked it up and inspected the blade. She gripped it by the pyramid, and the weapon looked like an extension of her fist. It was light weight and thrust very easily.
“It’s only meant for one attack. You pierce your enemy anywhere, and the metal of the blade seeps into the open wound. It doesn’t matter where. The metal will go straight into their brain. It will make them go insane before they die. It’s quite painful,” the dealer said while she looked over the blade.
“What happens if you aim for their heart?” Kal said as she touched the blade. It was tarnished with a green color. Kal had never felt further from her tribe then when she held the weapon. They were peaceful, and violence was never an answer. However, she had learned violence like she had learned any other skill. In the prison, she had used it to protect herself, but then something changed. It was the moment she struck down Dr. Feslerk. She realized there was a darkness hiding within her.