by M. D. Cooper
The light above the exit changed from red to green and the remaining passengers shuffled out. Markus caught sight of the captain and was surprised to see that he was Noctus. The disdain on his face was plain to see as he tried to distance himself from his own people.
Fool, Markus thought. Just because you despise us doesn’t mean the Lumins think any more of you—they don’t think of you at all.
The corridor outside the shuttle had a clear wall and the light of brilliant Sirius and its dimmer brother, Lucent, shone through. Though Brilliance station orbited the Lucent at a distance of only 0.5AU, Sirius A—currently 15AU distant—was still significantly brighter, providing something close to the amount of light Earth received from Sol.
Very little filtering blocked the radiance as it washed across the passengers, many of whom squinted in the glare, as they shuffled along in the heavy gravity.
Noctus stations rarely had any windows. To them Sirius was a harsh and cruel master, not a life-giving light filled with beauty. Looking at it meant blindness; being exposed to its light directly would certainly be followed by genetic damage; it was the destroyer, the bane of all life.
“It’s amazing to be able to look at it with my own eyes,” Simon said. “It’s beautiful.”
Markus nodded his agreement. “It’s easy to see why they constantly talk of light and brilliance and luminosity. Looking at the two sisters with your own eyes is quite the sight.”
He rested a hand on Simon’s shoulder, “you’ll have plenty of time to dawdle later. With the stars so close together they’ll have every portal open, you’ll see them dozens of times while we’re here.”
As they walked through the tunnel Markus caught a glimpse of the red-headed woman ahead of them. She was moving slowly, probably lost in a conversation on the Link. He found it interesting that she had altered her outfit. It was now much lighter in hue, flashing and glowing with wild abandon. It still had the gray tint and a perhaps hint of burgundy as well, though that might have been her hair reflecting off it.
“Now who’s staring?” Simon laughed.
“She’s striking,” Markus shrugged. “I’ve never seen one of their women so tall.”
The docking tunnel emptied into a large atrium so bright that Markus and Simon had to shield their eyes. Simon looked up and let out a cry. He grabbed the railing which ran around the upper-level balcony.
Markus looked up and smiled. He may dislike—or more accurately, despise—the Lumins, but they did have some amazing architecture.
Along the walls wide steel pillars rose up, arching toward each other, but tapering to fine points before reaching the center of the ceiling. The actual ceiling was completely transparent. Markus assumed there must be some sort of glass or plas above their heads, but it was completely indiscernible.
For all intents and purposes, it appeared as though the ceiling had never been put on and the pillars were attempting to capture Lucent which was always directly above.
Markus knew how Simon felt. Excepting shuttle bays, this was probably the largest room the young man had ever been in. Shuttle bays were always fully enclosed, and filled with ships and cargo. This space was clean and empty—excepting the shifting crowds entering and exiting the corridors which led to waiting ships.
Pulling his eyes from the architectural spectacle, not to mention the many Lumins in their gleaming outfits, Markus pulled out a small tablet. He waited a moment for it to auth with the station’s systems and then retrieved Brilliance Station’s layout, looking up the location of their meeting.
The Lumin overseers at the company didn’t really need Markus to come in person and present his plan for the upgrade of the SK87 mining platform, which he ran, but he suspected they did it to remind him of his place in the grand scheme of things.
Luther, the general manager and overseer of the mining platform, should have been there as well, but he was vacationing on the garden world Radius. He had instructed Markus to deliver all the summaries and reports to the supervising board alone. Even when Luther was present Markus did most of the talking, as Luther barely knew what was happening on his own station.
The wirless network protocols granted him limited access on Brilliance Station, but it was enough to load directions to their meeting. He had to all but pull Simon while the young man slowed to stare at everything. Markus couldn’t fault his young companion overmuch. He remembered his first trip to Brilliance, some thirty years ago when he had been a young man. The gleaming corridors and holo ads selling things he had never even heard of had boggled his mind.
Now, the cornucopia of products available was more insulting than fascinating. He barely had enough money to buy lunch on Brilliance, let alone any of the fancy toys that Luminescent Society wasted its money on.
He pushed his dislike of Luminescent opulence out of his mind and focused on his presentation.
The platform he worked and lived on, SK87, was performing well and Luther wanted to expand it. Markus had been sent to present the plans to the assessors for approval. Convincing the Lumin oversight board that it was the right plan would not be hard; a thousand years of delegating any hard work or menial labor meant they didn’t have much experience with assessing work schedules and ROI projections.
Markus was distracted by a particularly useless Lumin specimen they passed. He couldn’t be certain if it was male or female, but its arms and legs ended in wheels and it was spinning and rolling through the corridor, giggling as it went.
“I can’t believe we work our entire lives so they can turn themselves into useless…I don’t know whats…just useless,” Simon muttered.
Markus chuckled. “It wasn’t entirely useless; I imagine you could put some sort of bucket on it and turn it into a hauler.”
“I can imagine what the yard foreman would say about that,” Simon laughed softly
“We have about three hours before our meeting,” Markus said. “I know a place near here where we can get some food and relax for a bit.”
Simon nodded his assent and Markus led him through the wide boulevards to a less trafficked area. The overt gaudiness of the station was somewhat diminished, but it was still far more opulent than SK87.
Before long they reached their destination, a small restaurant that would serve Noctus—though only with automated servitors. After the robot had brought their food, Simon spent some time eyeing it suspiciously.
“Try it,” Markus prodded him. “It’s not often you get to eat something that wasn’t grown in a vat.”
Simon looked horrified. “You mean this was alive?”
“Of course, Lumins only eat real food. No vats or mush for them.”
Simon sat staring at his food for several minutes and eventually screwed up the courage to take a bite.
“Mmmm…I didn’t know food could taste so good! How do you go back to eating the crap on the platform after this?”
“With great sadness—though sometimes the thought of eating plants and animals unnerves me,” Markus commented.
The pair enjoyed the rest of their meal in silence, looking out the portals at the star-side view of Lucent and the world of Incandus below.
“Have you ever been to a planet?” Simon asked Markus.
“No, I have to admit that the thought scares me a bit. Once you’re down there you’re stuck, and everything wants to fall on you. I think it would terrify me.”
“I’ve seen pictures,” Simon’s voice grew wistful. “Parks larger than SK87, larger than anything we’ve seen—can you imagine?”
Markus nodded. If he hadn’t seen pictures himself, he would never have imagined anything like that even existed. The Lumins lived lives the Noctus could only dream of.
A few hours later, Markus and Simon sat in one of the company’s many conference rooms, waiting for the Lumins who would review their proposal. The room was spare, but elegant in its appointment. The table was a shimmering plas and the chairs appeared to hover on invisible plinths.
Markus had never b
een in this particular tower before, but was unsurprised by the luxurious appointments. He kept his focus on ensuring the presentation went well. Once done they could get off Brilliance—hopefully before he went blind from all the bright lights and reflective surfaces, which were already giving him a headache.
Simon had carefully distributed hyfilm around the table for the committee to take after the meeting—the Lumins seemed to react better to physical media than pure holo presentations. He now sat fumbling with his notepad, prepared to jot down any pertinent thoughts. The device could not record here, as the Lumins disallowed Noctus to record anything in Luminescent Space; physical notes were the only way to record decisions.
It also allowed the Lumins to revert nearly any decision by simply claiming the Noctus had incorrect records.
After only several minutes of waiting, the company team filed in. There were three men and two women. Markus was surprised to see that one of the women was the Lumin he had followed off the shuttle.
“Markus, good to see you,” Yusuf, the President of Resources and Extraction, said.
He did not offer to shake hands.
“It is good to see you, sir,” Markus nodded his head in deference. He did not expect to see Yusuf here. It wasn’t a good sign—the president of R&E only made appearances to Markus’s detriment.
Yusuf did not acknowledge the gesture. “You know Thomas, Vlad and Sarah. Our newest member is Katrina; she manages transport and logistics for platform services.”
“It is good to meet you,” Markus nodded again. “I have one of my young team leads, Simon, with me. He knows the internals of our platform inside and out.”
None of the Lumins acknowledged Simon. Markus barely rated their attention and he had spent decades garnering the meager level of respect he now had.
The discussions were largely perfunctory. Most of the details of the platform’s expansion had been reviewed by the non-sentient AI Lumins employed for such tasks. It was Markus’s belief that the Lumins only brought him here to remind him who was the final authority in his life .
When they came to living quarters enhancements Yusuf scowled at the display.
“This expansion does not seem to be in proportion with the rest of the platform. It brings your living quarter allotment from 10% of platform space to 12%.”
Markus nodded. “Yes, sir, it does. 12% of platform space for living quarters is standard when platforms exceed twenty-eight cubic kilometers.”
“On new platforms that is the case, but this is an expansion of an existing platform, those concessions do not apply.” Yusuf spoke offhand as though he had given this little thought, but Markus knew the man. He was doing this on purpose to keep Markus in his place and not let him garner too much favor with his own people.
“Surely—.” Markus began, but was cut off by the wave of Yusuf’s hand.
All of the Lumins looked entirely implacable with the exception of Katrina whose lips twitched for just a moment, her expression belying a moment of consternation.
“Seriously?” Simon erupted beside Markus. “You’re going to increase our population by 120% to facilitate the additional throughput, but only increase our living space by 90%? We’re already crammed in cheek to cheek!”
“Simon!” Markus put a hand on his young companion’s shoulder in an attempt to quell his outburst.
“No, Markus, no! You’re as much a part of the problem as they are. I’ve seen it for myself, you bow and scrape and take whatever they give,” Simon stood to his full three meters as he yelled. Towering over the table, he reached into his jacket and began to pull something out.
“For the true Sirians and our independence!”
Markus fell back, aghast that Simon would do something so rash.
The Lumins looked alarmed at the outburst, with the exception of Yusuf. A smile played at the edges of his mouth and a stasis cone snapped down around Simon. A high pitched whine pierced the room and a decoupling field tore apart all matter in the cone.
The field broke Simon’s body down into a fine mist in moments. Markus listened for an explosion, or something that would indicate the young man had reached for a weapon.
Nothing.
Yusuf waved his hand and a holo appeared over the table showing Simon’s last moments in slow motion. He turned and zoomed; they could all see what he was pulling from his coat
“Hmm… a flag,” Yusuf sighed. “A lot of theatrics for a piece of cloth.” He looked to Markus. “Let’s hope your next assistant has more brains—and you have the intelligence to not make a mistake like that again. You run your people well. If not for that, I would kill you too.”
Markus couldn’t believe the calm in Yusuf’s voice. He had seen Lumins kill Noctus before, but never like this, never so casually.
Yusuf looked to his committee. “Unless there are any objections I approve this expansion proposal, excepting the disproportionate increase in living quarters.” He waited a moment to see if anyone spoke up; when none did, the President of Resources and Extraction stood and left the room.
Markus stood, silently watching them file out, unwilling to look at the seat where Simon should have been. Only the new woman, Katrina, looked him in the eye. Her expression showed a flash of sympathy and then she too was gone.
Markus barely noticed. The only thing on his mind was the thought of telling Simon’s mother.
He barely remembered getting back to the shuttle.
As he sat silently in his small quarters on the trip back to Sirius, a plan to started to form in Markus’s mind.
There had always been talk of rebellion among the Noctus. It had been present for his entire life, waxing and waning over the years. At present, there were more whispers in dark corners than usual, especially among the youth who had not been alive for the previous generation’s failed attempts—and the Lumins’ retribution.
The dissidents traded seditious documents and data, and held their small rallies in hidden areas of the platform. Markus had always tolerated them while ensuring they didn’t get too vocal and cause problems.
He had thought he was doing the right thing by protecting his people, keeping things in balance. But something about how casually Yusuf had killed Simon triggered a change in Markus. Maybe he had just had enough and had gone past his tipping point, but one thing was for certain: he saw things in a new light.
Markus knew why the other rebellions had failed. It was not because of lack of conviction, or even a failure to take a given platform or station.
Past rebellions had almost always succeeded at taking their initial objectives, but holding them was the problem. The Lumin space force arrived and either the rebels surrendered or were destroyed.
The way to succeed was to leave Sirius.
REVOLUTION
STELLAR DATE: 3246204 / 09.15.4175 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Mining Platform SK87
REGION: Noctilucent Space, Sirius Hegemony
Markus could still hear the sobbing cries of Simon’s mother in his ears. She had been so eager to hear how well her son had done in his new role. To go from that, to news of his callous death at the hands of the Lumins, may well be more than she could bear—especially after losing her husband in an accident several years earlier.
Markus made a note to check in on her in the days to come. The community on the platform was tight-knit and neighbors would console her and help her through this time—but it never hurt to be sure she didn’t need additional counseling.
Around him the corridors of the platform, ever bleak, seemed even more so. Endless kilometers of obedience, centuries of acquiescence.
Markus’s tall frame was hunched; his years weighed more heavily upon him than ever before. He barely noticed others as he passed them by, be they the Noctus workers—his people—or the sparse Lumin guards of the station’s garrison.
Although his frame implied defeat, his mind was churning with a fire he had not felt in many years. He had a plan and was about to take the firs
t step in launching it.
He made his way past the platform’s two-hundred-year-old refinery—one of the areas he had proposed upgrades for that fateful day on Brilliance Station; past the bio vats in hydroponics; and into the waste reclamation area.
There was no doubt in his mind that they were meeting. He knew the players, knew how they thought, and what drove them. It drove him now as well.
It was a good place to meet, security patrols rarely came down to reclamation. The smell was enough to keep even the most brutish of them from making much more than a cursory examination every few weeks.
Markus, on the other hand, knew every corridor, every hatch, portal and conduit on the platform. Even without intel from people loyal to him he knew where this meeting would be held.
The door was unmarked; there was nothing to separate it from any other hatch in reclamation. It was a thick, gray plas, but through it he could hear the sound of voices raised in anger.
Markus took a deep breath and steeled himself for the storm he was about to endure.
He opened the door.
The first thing he noticed was that the room had many more occupants than he would have expected. Over forty men and women stood amongst the tanks and pipes, expressions ranging from rage to sorrow drawn across their faces.
The second was the figure of Sarah standing on a large vat, yelling at the crowd, whipping them into a frenzy.
“You see how they so callously kill one of our best sons, in cold blood, with no regard for us. We are worse than slaves; we are the children of slaves, and the parents of slaves. We raise new slaves and secure generations of our children as thralls of the shorts.”
The crowd replied with groans and cheers at the appropriate times, but perhaps not as enthusiastically as Sarah had hoped. After being pushed down for so long it was hard to even know what standing should feel like.
Markus had always liked Sarah, even though he knew she despised him. She saw him as nothing more than a puppet of their masters. Little did she know how often he had worked tirelessly to protect his people from far worse than they knew.