The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  The bracelet made another jump. The next memories seemed to be a prelude of another battle. A commotion started on the ship’s bridge, hurried soldiers dressing in their fight suits and activating their bracelets, even though there were no enemy ships in sight.

  The reason for the ruckus was that they had entered a planetary system. Antyra! Gill’s hearts were beating wildly at the thought that he was about to see his world before Zhan’s arrival. Maybe he’d have the chance to glimpse Baitar Raman himself!

  “Mapu’s on screen,” exclaimed a Sigian, damping Gill’s excitement.

  It appeared that Kirk’an had disobeyed Deko’s suggestion and picked Mapu. He wanted to hide under the tails of their enemies!

  They were flying above one of the poles, which was covered by a huge ice cap. He couldn’t see the details due to a high-altitude cloud layer concealing the planet’s surface, but as far as Gill could tell, it was an ocean world.

  “Is it a good idea to hide the destroyer on this world?” asked the bracelet bearer. If we meet the enemies on Antyra, we can’t fight them with the rescue modules!”

  “My concern is to hide the ark,” replied Kirk’an.

  “How are we going to hide the destroyer? We need a good hiding place, but easy to reach it later.”

  “My plan is very simple,” Kirk’an replied. “We don’t have time to hide it ourselves. We’re going to ask the natives to do it for us!”

  “Are you sure about this?” the bracelet bearer exclaimed, bewildered. “I thought the idea was to keep the place secret, not to show it to everyone!”

  “Our shields can’t emulate the frequency of the water, and we don’t know a suitable cave. Their muon probes will find it in the end. We have to shield it under bedrock to gain some time.”

  “So we just leave and let the primitives hide it?” asked another incredulous Sigian.

  “Right! We’re going to pretend we are their gods. We’ll ask them to raise a hill over the destroyer and forget about it.”

  “Deko said their spies are here already!” exclaimed the bracelet bearer. “How can we—”

  “We’re going to fly in on the western continent, where the natives are still in the stone era. We’ll frighten them to keep the secret, and if we don’t make it back, they’ll forget everything in one generation.”

  “If we don’t come back, that won’t matter much,” mumbled the Sigian-Gill, still convinced they were making a huge mistake by leaving their greatest weapon buried on Mapu.

  The memories jumped again, this time to the known images of the Sigians lying under a canopy on top of a temple. Far from them, hidden by a thick cloud of dust, thousands of natives were carrying huge stone blocks, rolling them on logs, or pulling them with ropes made of wines, attempting to hide the golden destroyer in a hillside!

  Beyond the hills, he saw two small golden ships parked on the nearest shore of a large lake. Rescue modules, waiting to fly them to Antyra to meet the Rigulian ambassadors.

  Finally, after one more pause, another star rose in the center of the screen.

  “Antyra!” exclaimed someone.

  His world, at last! And he didn’t have to wait to make his first discovery because the firewall was missing altogether! Antyra was once part of the myriads of stars anchored in the cold darkness. Perhaps the Sacred Book was right after all, and Zhan really closed their world inside the belly of Beramis when he punished them. Maybe that happened shortly after the Sigians reached Antyra. With a bit of luck, Gill was hoping to find the evidence in the memories of the artifact.

  His joy didn’t last long, though. Antyra’s star started to shiver on the main screen. Then, he realized the whole image was trembling. Are we attacked already? Gill worried. Yet the Sigians didn’t seem to notice the strange phenomenon…

  To his surprise, some Sigian symbols appeared in the upper-left corner of his vision. Something was happening with the bracelet, he finally figured. A series of green fluorescent lines divided his vision into a grid, and then, without warning, a brutal twister sucked him out of the god’s memory.

  The bracelet awoke him without orders! As he wondered what might have happened, he heard a discreet knocking at the door frame. Alala! The artifact somehow detected her and stopped the dream! After a while, the female knocked again, a bit more insistently this time.

  “Come in,” he answered in a hoarse voice.

  Alala entered the room. She had dressed in a tight purple blouse made of synthetic scales, outlining the shape of her beautiful body. Although still fighting to regain his senses, he couldn’t miss the intense scent coming from her head spikes. It was a unique aroma, skillfully crafted to tingle his nostrils and wake up his instincts numbed by the madness of the last several hours.

  Then something unexpected happened: as she approached him, Alala nonchalantly opened her back pocket and let her tail free. And as if that wasn’t enough already, she wobbled it playfully from side to side, without the smallest trace of modesty.

  He felt his blood running to the top of his head spikes. What did she want from him? To let the tail free was a familiar gesture that said a lot. Of course, he could always be mistaken, but after a day like this, nothing could surprise him, not even the possibility that they’d end the evening in a passionate embrace with their tails coiled together, sunk in the scented fluff of her welcoming nest…

  Obviously, he wasn’t good at this. Deciding not to make a foolish mistake, he pretended he didn’t notice anything. Anyway, tradition required that the female took the first step if she was attracted by someone and desired to mate. Of course, lately, the traditions had begun to change, to the annoyance of the temples. But the old ritual demanded that she would approach the male and bow her head, offering her head spikes to be smelled. If the offer was accepted, the male woke them to life by blowing softly on them, then gently caressing them one by one with his wet lips.

  What a moment she found to play like that… Ernon, her “special” friend, lay crushed to death under a huge rock, and Gill felt a huge emptiness in his kyi after living the terrible fate of the Sigians. On top of that, he lost a dear friend, and the fabric of their world was unraveling. It definitely wasn’t the happiest moment to mate…

  Despite the temptation, he intended to refuse. However, an unsettling thought pinched his tail: What if this is the last day of my life? What if the temples sniffed my tail?

  The legendary Laixan said in his greatest story, “Ten Nights in Zagrada”:

  Always in times of need, the Antyrans are consumed by the scents of passion. The touch of death has the gift to remind anyone how quickly their precious little life is fleeting, to push them into the arms of “here and now.” They become more alive in a day of war than in a whole age of peace.

  After being almost blown into pieces twice in the same day by the Sigian bracelet, he was feeling the hunger of “being alive” growing inside him. He wanted to be alive, to feel his life flowing frantically through his veins. Maybe Alala was feeling the same way. Maybe she wanted to close the gap in her kyi, to fill it with his presence and stop looking back, at least for the moment. Maybe.

  “I wanted to check how you’re doing,” she said in a warm voice. “We’re on the brink of war, and you’re staying here alone. Let’s eat something!”

  The strange thing was that the green grid on his retinas didn’t disappear. He noticed that the rectangle framing the spot on which he focused his eyes always became thicker than the others. Looking at the window, he estimated that the rectangles ended at about fifty feet from him.

  He wanted to pull out the bracelet, but he couldn’t do it with Alala in the room. Maybe he should give it a mental order to disconnect? Still, the artifact proved smart enough to wake him when Alala knocked on the door. He was hopeful that it wouldn’t sink him in another dream without warning. The Sigians used the green lines for something. Maybe it would be a good thing to keep it activated and find the reason. He suspected that the bracelet had a bigger purpose than record
ing the memories of the owner.

  Gill tried to get off the nest, but he had to hold on to its edge, too dizzy to keep his balance. Without a word, Alala rushed to help him. Afraid that she might unwittingly touch the artifact through his clothes, he turned his left shoulder to her.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked, worried. “How bad did the blast hurt you?”

  “I’m fine! I’m fine! Just a bit hungry, that’s all,” he mumbled awkwardly.

  The female shook her head, little inclined to believe him.

  “Let me help you. After dinner, I’ll let you smell the seeds I’ve been working on for the last ten years. They’re close to perfection,” she said with a tempting smile, to cover her lack of modesty (the truth is that modesty had no place when the Antyrans talked about their aromas). “I’m sure you’re going to relax.”

  “I can hardly wait!” he exclaimed with fake enthusiasm. “What do we have for dinner?”

  “Pretty much nothing—what do you expect?” she chuckled. “I only know how to open a can. I hope you’re better than that; otherwise, we’ll die of boredom.”

  Gill had a suspicion that their stay in the dome would by anything but boring. Even though cooking was not her main asset, she fully compensated with other qualities, he thought.

  “And we don’t have much food,” she continued with the bad news. “If we stay longer, you’ll have to provide. Go hunt some wild moulans to feed me,” she teased him.

  “Great idea! And how do I kill them? Oh, I know, I could run them down with my jet,” he replied ironically.

  “Yes! See? Excellent, you’re thinking of everything,” she exclaimed playfully.

  “In that case, I’m going to need a chaser to herd them. How’s your running?”

  “You need a chaser? I’ll give you chaser! Get down to eat!”

  “I hope you cooked the siclides well. You know they’re toxic if not boiled at least half an hour,” he said, pretending to be worried, although he was pretty sure they came from an instant can.

  “Go! Now!”

  Seeing his hesitating moves, she grabbed his left arm and helped him walk to the door, casually rubbing her tail along his thigh. A shiver of surprise rushed up his spine. Did she touch him on purpose? Anyway, she didn’t seem to notice the effect she had on him. Or maybe she was just playing with him. That wouldn’t be unheard of; after all, she was a female.

  The broth didn’t taste as bad as he feared it would. Actually, he would call it delicious, considering he hadn’t eaten for a whole day. Even before finishing his meal, the digestion overcame him. Weariness seeped into his bones like a river of molten lead. His tail became numb, which was a clear hint he had to go to sleep. He peeked in the other room to make sure Alala wasn’t looking at him, and he started to rub his tail. Seeing that it didn’t help much, he pulled its tip out of the back pocket and wobbled it vigorously from side to side to restore the blood flow. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his lucky day. Alala appeared suddenly in the doorstep, surprising him in the indecent posture.

  “Leave the food and come quickly!” she cried, agitated, seemingly without noticing his indecent wobbles. “Bad things are happening!”

  The center of Alixxor scrolled into view inside the large holotheater. All around the huge Shindam towers, the tide of a million Antyrans poured chaotically in all directions. The hologram was scanned from the air, probably from a flying jet. He immediately recognized the circular tower in the center and knew why she called him. Things were quickly unfolding on Alixxor, and not in a good way.

  The exalted crowd of tarjis, dressed in brown ritual clothes, was hopping around the fires lit near the Executive Tower, shouting taunts at the Shindam’s acronte29. They burned the inflatable furniture of the building, together with the collection of ancient manuscripts from the basement. Hundreds of years of history were turned into ashes under Gill’s horrified eyes, and nobody did anything to stop the disaster.

  In some places, even the Great Tower began to smoke heavily. Judging by the marks on its walls, the tarjis must have lit it several times, but each time, the building’s fire defenses overcame the fire. Now, finally, it seemed they had found a way to shut them down—the arson was about to succeed.

  Large bowls lay on every street corner, twirling their scented smoke around the columns of the tarjis. Gill had no doubt what kind of aromas the initiates poured over the hot embers. The tarjis’ killing mood (already triggered by Baila’s speeches) was surely inflamed by the hormones carried in the evening gushes of wind.

  The same news ran on most of the holofluxes, undoubtedly fallen into Baila’s claws.

  “We just heard that the council was arrested. The traitor Regisulben is hiding like a coward in a military base, along with some of the Shindam’s counselors. But rest assured: no one will escape our just punishment!”

  “No violence was reported,” said another initiate. “The tarjis took the power peacefully, under Zhan’s all-seeing eye.”

  The images were telling a different story, though. Despite the clumsy attempts of the temples to hide the truth, the holograms betrayed the brutality of their takeover. Here and there, ugly holes dotted the buildings, and plenty of bodies in civilian or military tunics could be seen lying on the pavement at the feet of the crowd. Certainly those who tried to resist were overwhelmed and silenced by the tarjis’ weapons. How could the temples arm them so quickly? Surely they were ready for such an opportunity!

  “Arghail is in Alixxor!” someone shouted in a booster shell.

  “We’ll defeat him! We’ll defeat him!” the exalted crowd shouted back.

  The view switched to a hologram scanned from an even higher altitude. At first, they saw the Roch-Alixxor mountain range, and then the city itself. The resolution slowly increased over the capital. All around Alixxor, a perfect circle was taking shape, a living chain formed by tarjis dressed in red clothes, the sacred color of the fight against Arghail. Gill thought that only Baila had the right to dress like that, but now he saw legions of them wearing the color. Not only that, but they thrust a row of sacred rikanes30 into the ground in front of them. The holly wood had the weird property of becoming fluorescent red in contact with air, which made it even more valuable in the fight against Arghail. They hung painted banners of Zhan’s angry eye on their poles. Another smaller circle surrounded about half of the city blocks. Finally, two other circles were inside of it. The last ones were close to perfection, the tarjis keeping the chain linked regardless of the obstacles in their path. They even went so far as to climb on top of some tall towers just to keep the shape. Right in the center was the training base in western Alixxor, the one where the Sigian artifacts lay buried. Most of the tarjis were here, called by Baila to join the battle against the god of darkness.

  Barriers against Arghail. They were mere symbols, but they were worth more than standing armies because if some simple rikanes couldn’t dream of stopping the Shindam’s armored vehicles, the fact that they were carved out of murra made them a formidable obstacle. By assuming the title of fighters against Arghail, the tarjis condemned those who opposed them to fight under the banner of the “Ultimate Evil.” Arghail had to cross the sacred barriers to reach his offspring. If the Shindam’s soldiers would break the circles, they would serve the god of darkness and become his slaves for eternity.

  This subtlety betrayed Baila XXI’s organizing skills. If the prophet hadn’t dressed the tarjis in red, the council may have had a chance to save itself. But now, with millions of fanatics in the city and the sacred barriers blocking any movement, the Shindam’s position became very precarious.

  “We just found a column of armored chameleons heading to Alixxor,” one of the initiates exclaimed in a worried voice.

  A strong roar came from the crowd. Yet, not a single tarji broke ranks; on the contrary, they tightened their lines to sustain one another.

  The hologram focused on a magneto-highway leading to the city, clogged by thousands of magneto-jets abandon
ed on the exit lanes. The security column was riding through an acajaa crop growing along the road. Because their camouflage was activated, the trail of orange-colored juice left behind was the only clue betraying their presence.

  “I don’t get it,” exclaimed Gill, puzzled. “They don’t realize they’re being followed from the air? Why isn’t anyone shooting the air-jet?”

  “Gill, the Security Tower’s burning! They can’t shoot anything while their tail’s on fire!”

  The speedy column approached the first circle. Are they going to ram through? the worried Antyrans from the three inhabited worlds asked themselves.

  The chameleons reached the chain of bodies and apparently decided to charge through it, but the tarjis held their stance together without backing away a single inch.

  “Stop, on Zhan’s eye!” they shouted, fluttering their rikanes in the air in a threatening manner. “You shall not pass!”

  The vehicles arrived in front of the tarjis… and stopped.

  The troops had neural inductors designed to control the motor centers of the Antyrans. At least in theory, they could order the unshielded tarjis to move out of their way if they wanted to. But the inductors remained silent, along with the other nonlethal weapons installed on the chameleons. The Shindam’s army had no intention of confronting the prophet and incurring Zhan’s wrath by hitting his sons.

  “The armors stopped,” Gill sighed. “Baila won!”

  He could easily tell that some of the defenders were no ordinary tarjis. Their ranks were swelled by the assassins of the “Zhan’s Children”31 coria, who were much better armed and eager to die for the prophet. But that wasn’t all. The temples brought soldiers wearing reflective exoskeletons, positioned now on the tallest buildings. They had trained and armed a whole army right under the Shindam’s tail, without arousing the slightest suspicion! How hated was the Shindam’s Council, how angry became the Antyrans with their abuses if no one jumped to rescue them, if their own army abandoned them so quickly!