Multiverse: Stories Across Realms

by Steve Rzasa

  The Torchbearer is the tale of his time to protect the innocent.

  There are flames upon my soul.

  Winter winds freeze flesh and snow piles to the knees here in the Motherland, upon Riven Plain of Rus. Yet I can stand outside the door, in only a sleeveless shirt and breeches. Steam rises from my skin.

  The fire inside keeps me warm on these frigid nights. My dreams are full of flames. A hamlet burns to the ground, wood frames crackling. Men in dark armor slaughter innocents, and I wade through torched homes, leaving nothing but charred corpses. I bring death as swiftly as a forest ablaze.

  Screams jolt me awake.

  Sweat drips across the ice as I touch a tiny window peering out of my stone hut. Sails descend from clouds as thick as quilts, each one as white as the sky and streaked with blood red. Black lines slither down from dark oak hulls. Shapes drop along the ropes from the cloudships into the village Iskra, nestled at a broad bend in the Daugava River.

  Bah. Raiders.

  The forest to south is a palisade of pines. A jagged canyon to the east bounds the village, with only one bridge shuddering in the winds. The villagers have no escape.

  My oath forswears me from using magic. It is my penance, the only way to make amends for the evil I have wrought in the service of vile men. I must stay hidden.

  Yet, the screams.

  The clash of battle drifts to me on the wind, swords and spears on wood. Gunfire booms; smoke billows. Lusty roars mingle in chaos.

  More screams. They could belong to the girl who brings me fresh bread, or the hunter who shares his game. Those are the souls who care for me though I deserve shame. Those are the ones dying.

  The burn expands. Fire ripples through my chest, into my arms, to the tips of my fingers. I loosen my grip upon the beam. Blackened handprints remained seared to the grain.

  Drifted snow hampers my first strides, but a dozen yards later it melts with my approaching steps. No more hiding in a cottage far from the village, wallowing in self-pity.

  Iskra sprawls before me. Eight dirt streets are coated white, dozens of cottages with straw roofs now frosted, a slate gray stone tower, a chapel of faded orange brick. The last is afire, thick black smoke pouring from its windows. Shattered stained glass litters the ground, rainbow-colored blood spilled on snow. Flames turn everything red and yellow, sickly stains on white blanket.

  Furred forms of raiders hustle through the streets, chasing villagers clad in brown and grey woolen garb. These barbarians are Vendobaltii, from the northwest, who have come before to steal girls for pleasure and enslave boys for war. They wear the furs of slain chimera, or so the tales say.

  There are tales of me, too.

  The hulls of their ships are fifty feet above, casting deep, oblong shadows over huts. Darkness falls.

  I feel it. The burn is unbearable. Steam rises from my hands, from my neck, and my face.

  The nearest Vendobaltii, a young blond man with thick beard, turns toward me. One hand holds an axe with curved obsidian blade; the other grasps the dress of a maiden who is not out of her teens.

  “Leave her, or you burn,” I warn.

  Does he fear me? He sees what I see in the grimy glass of my cottage windows: shaven head, brilliant orange beard, eyes the pale of ice, black tattoos of stylized fire enmeshing my arms from shoulders to wrists. Some say I am crazed.

  It is not madness. It is magic.

  My hands glow as hot coals.

  “Summoner!” The blond warrior drops the girl, and charges at me.

  I thrust a palm before him, and murmur words long banished from my lips: “Scintillae ignis.”

  Fire shoots forth, a blinding stream of yellow, white, and red. It strikes the warrior’s chest, encircling him, hungry, devouring his furred cloak and armor and flesh and bone.

  He screams, but it’s muffled by the roar.

  I can’t see anything. My eyes roll up. The release. Years of pent up fire, awaiting this moment, this explosion. A shout reverberates from my lungs, overpowering even the roar of the flames.

  When I relinquish, the raider is ash.

  The girl stares, tears frozen to her cheeks. Those same eyes crinkled with smiles when she arrived at my door, the end of every month, with a roast quail.

  I will not let her die. “Get out of the village. Move!”

  She scrambles toward edge of town.

  I find most of horde in the village center. Twenty raiders stand over the bodies of slain acolytes. Blood pools crimson beneath white robes. These boys were naught twelve. The priest has a musket pressed to his forehead.

  Why the chapel? Why the one place that told others they needn’t fear me?

  Flames churn in my open palms. The raiders see me, and shout alarms. They freeze with a plunder of gold still clutched in their hands.

  Wave after wave of fire thrashes them, scouring the brick walls, melting snow, charring ground, as I immolate the raiders.

  Their screams I tolerate.

  The remaining few flee to swaying ropes, clambering up to their ships. I form a massive ball of flames between my hands. It grows to size of a boulder three feet across. My heart hammers. Darkness presses in at my vision.

  Yet, I do not burn. I never burn.

  With a grunt, I heave the fireball up, giving it the spin of a discus thrower. It strikes the center of the three ships, and explodes into three fragments. They curve up and around the nearest hull. Within seconds all three are burning, and the sails follow, igniting in sheets of crimson flame.

  Fire burns through the ropes. Men topple to the ground, rolling in soot and snow. Their ships veer away, guided by gouts of flame I throw at them, until the aethershard crystals keeping them aloft shatter. Green shards explode and fling themselves high into the sky, fading to nothing. The ships crash upon the river, steam roaring as a hungry dragon

  The last six raiders get to their knees, faces smudged and cloaks singed. “Spare us, summoner! Spare us your judgment!”

  I stand over them, hands on fire, insides blazing hot. “I don’t judge. I sentence.”

  They incinerate.

  I am Flint Volkov. So ends my atonement.

  SEND AND RECEIVE (2015)

  A LOT OF WHAT PUSHES me toward a new writing project is the spark in my head that says, “Hey, I’ve never done that before. I should try it—could be fun!”

  Send and Receive is a Christmas story, and is experimental in more than just that regard. It’s told first-person, something I’ve never done for The Face of the Deep story universe. Plus, I wanted to look at the loneliness of deep space travel. The other major characters of my books have families, or crews, or soldier comrades. Vincent has no one, save his robotic workers.

  Of course, the challenge then was to find an antagonist for a protagonist who is, essentially, a future telephone repairman. The answer was to pit him against not only faulty machinery, but the cold depths of space itself.

  24 December 2611

  Alcova Star System

  It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m 180 trillion kilometers from home.

  That doesn’t surprise me. MarkTel Corporation needs comms ferries deployed at the sundoors between stars, without regard for holidays, especially when those holidays are the archaic remnants of an oppressed religious sect.

  The mission is simple enough: my ship, RMS Marconi, is to deploy two of the four comms ferries she carries in the touch tracts that lead from Alcova to the next star systems down the line. Those ferries are nothing more than small Raszewski spheres capable of hopping from one touch tract to the other, bridging the dozen or so light years between sundoors circling two different stars. That’s how a starship can carry passengers, cargo, or weapons over distances that would usually take centuries, thanks to the quantum singularity—artificial black hole—generated at the core of each sphere.

  Same thing goes for communications. Signals, no matter what information they carry, move only as fast as the speed of light. And the scientists at Alcova’s biological rese
arch station on the second planet—Alcova Prime—don’t want to wait 60 years for messages and data to make a round trip to their bosses.

  So the comms ferry will sit in the touch tract, lazing around an invisible expanse not far from Alcova’s primary, and soak up everything that comes in—heaps of research reports, holo charts, video recordings of the planet’s wildlife, personal texts and vids to loved ones. Then, pop. It’ll disappear from Alcova and reappear at Yeosu, 11 light-years away.

  But comms ferries don’t get into place by themselves. And they don’t always work properly. Name for me one system that does, biological, mechanical, or otherwise. That’s where comms jockeys come in. Namely, me.

  Vincent Chen. Twenty-seven. Captain.

  Technically, that’s what I am, even though the service record with MarkTel lists me as “Interstellar Communications Ferry Deployment & Maintenance Specialist.”

  The title doesn’t matter so much as the self-appointed “captain” when the tract shift dumps me in to Alcova. For a few seconds afterward I see double, ghostly afterimages of the control board, its slew of panels and displays blurred in shades of blue.

  Always blue. Alarm Blue. I wave my hand, ten fingers that coalesce slowly into five. Within seven seconds, everything’s normal.

  I shut down the alarm lights, and restore normal colors to the bridge. Nothing pretty. It’s a sphere four meters in diameter, with my chair and a semi-circle of consoles wrapped around me perched directly in the center. The curved interior surface is a pale, eggshell white crisscrossed with silver and black lines. Plain, for now.

  Another control triggers the best show. The entire inside of the sphere flashes, and gives me a view of surrounding space, as if I and Marconi are one. In that instant I’m the ship, floating in space, with the sharp glare of Alcova’s white-hot F-type star to starboard. The Nav computer strings planetary orbits in yellow lines out from the star, and pulls up a holo of Marconi off my left arm so that I get the full view of external and internal systems.

  Marconi is practical and plain. She has a single Raszewski sphere at the center, with a block of stubby engines aft. Four cooling vanes stud the tail end, like a carp’s fins. Grandfather told me a legend about the falls of the Yellow River, way back on Earth. Supposedly a carp that leapt them would transform into a glorious dragon.

  Green lights, one after the other, blink in the hologram. All four comms ferries Marconi carries dangle from the bow spar like fruit on a branch. I have trouble reconciling the image with my expectations of mythical beasts.

  Sensors confirm: the F-type star pulses with radiation, far in excess of what’s healthy for the operating systems of a half million dollar comms ferry. Not dangerous to humans—the hulls of starships like Marconi are more than thick enough to withstand periodic barrages. But something as sensitive as a comms ferry would be toast. So it’s a matter of finding the right spot, within the amorphous blobs that represent the tract shifts, where the ferries can take up station without getting fried.

  Toast. Fried. Makes me hungry. I leave the Nav computer crunching numbers—there I go again!—and head for the galley.

  The bow spar of Marconi is laid out simply: my cabin behind the bridge, the greenhouse beyond that, and a small galley tucked in behind the greenhouse. The corridor’s light gray on the bulkheads and dark gray on the deck plates, with bright yellow lights set in to the edges of the ceiling and floors. I painted her once, this whole corridor, from the bridge hatch more than 20 meters down to the next hatch, the one that leads through the Raszewski sphere to Engineering and Fuel Reserves. MarkTel techs repainted it. Deviation from specs, they said.

  So now, I hang rugs.

  Hooked rugs, made by hand. The one of the sunset is from Muhterem; the soaring eagle, a Liberty specialty; the lotus blossoms on a blue pond, straight from Harendra Desh. Easy to take down when I get back to the nearest MarkTel depot. There’s only three rugs, spread out over 10 meters, because they’re expensive. Keep up this habit and I won’t have money left to spend on real food beyond MarkTel rations.

  The galley’s barely worth the name. There’s two chairs and a table, slapped against one bulkhead, with food processors, sink, and storage at the back. I peel the cover off a Pasta and Mushrooms/Standard Meal 9. Dried cherries and grapes take the edge off the bland. The smell pushes aside Marconi’s recycled air.

  She needs more smells. Sure, there’s metal and plastic and ozone—the last especially if something burns out. Occasionally there’s good old-fashioned human body odor, if I neglect showering. That happens when the days blur by. I miss the smells of other people, though. Their food. Their clothing. Blast, even their lack of deodorant!

  I sit in one of the chairs, and shovel into the meal. The chair opposite stays empty. No magically appearing meal partner. Cruel, if you ask me, that MarkTel reps ship out Declaration-Class tenders with one crew and two chairs.

  I’m not technically alone. The hatch to Engineering slides open with a whoosh, and a pair of hamsters skitter along the corridor. Each one’s the size of my food and curved like a giant beetle. Spines and antennae and pincers protrude at weird angles. One has a blue stripe, the other red. I call them Blue and Scarlet, two of the sixteen who roam Marconi fixing what’s broken and making lists of things I need to do.

  Plus, I’ve got eight brassjackets, palm-sized hovering drones that flit about, doing pretty much the same thing. So that brings my crew complement up to 24.

  But they aren’t people.

  I tap my wrist comm. It’s linked to the bridge, and every computer system aboard. Nav’s about 80 percent done. Right now I just need one less vital system.

  Strains of guoyue by the Tiaozhanese Planetary Orchestra reverberate off the bulkheads. The benefits of being the only crew: no one complains of my choice of music.

  My comm beeps. Nav computer’s done. And it has good news.

  Maneuvering into position for deployment is slow going. You can’t use the main drives—they give high thrust but spit out near as much radiation as the star. Ion drives are much slower, and steadier, allowing for precision.

  I ease Marconi near the area Nav has isolated as the best place for Ferry 601. It’s near enough to the locations prior sensor probes have deemed safe after months of observations. Good enough for me. Hands on the docking clamps, I pray, “This one is in your hands, Lord and Father.”

  The clamps release. 601 floats free. I set off bursts from the bow thrusters, decelerating, while 601 continues at Marconi’s prior velocity. I watch as the green diamond labeled “601” drifts toward the white area glowing in the Nav spread out before me.

  It crosses.

  I fire 601’s tiny thrusters, killing its momentum. She will drift, yes; nothing in space is ever still. Those thrusters will need to be recharged a couple years down the road. For now, she’s set in a stable location.

  The Comms center rings. And I do mean ring—I replaced the standard alert with a sound that, I’m told, accurately mimics the bell-like ringing of seven hundred-year-old communications devices.

  It takes me five seconds to realize the call’s for me.

  I shouldn’t be getting any calls. Alcova is a system unused, except by researchers on one project or another. I’ve certainly never been here. And no one wants to contact a comms ferry tender. Why would they? We’re repairmen.

  I swipe at the screen. It’s indeed addressed “To Captain, RMS Marconi, from Exobiology Research Station Bravo Charlie Eight—Comms Staff.” Okay then. Here’s hoping they realize I did not bring them any news, other than what was recorded from the Reach galactic network before I made the tract shift.

  The message opens. It’s video of a woman, clad in a forest green jumpsuit and cream turtleneck. She’s lovely—mei bai. Dark eyes so wide I could be lost on their event horizon. Long black hair frames the sides of her face.

  “Good morning, Captain. I know you’re probably on an entirely different time base but it’s early a.m. here on scenic Alcova Prime.” Her voi
ce is light, full of humor. I slide the volume indicator up, and run the vid through the scrubbers. Now it sounds more real, as if she were present. “I’m Comms Staffer Melinda Qin. We’d appreciate whatever news you may have brought, outside the comms ferries you carry. Most of my colleagues want to stay up on current events. I realize you don’t have any personal messages with you, until the ferries are up and running, but try telling a non-Commer that, right?”

  I chuckle. We’re either mysterious wizards or balky techs, depending on whether the other person’s had a good or bad day. I start the warm-up for 601. Ten minutes, and she’ll be ready to make her first tract shift. All goes well, she’ll come back six hours later full of all the data the Alcovans could want.

  The Comms staffer is chatty, and I wish I could respond to her jests, and her questions, the instant she voices them. Sadly, I’m 1.2 astronomical units from her. That’s 180 million kilometers. It took ten minutes for her message to reach me, and will take the same for my reply to meet her. A conversation that should take seconds in person could stretch beyond a half hour.

  “In any case, please signal us when your ferries are operational. I’ve sent the relevant data streams for transmission. Thanks, and be safe.”

  The video blanks. She’s true to her word, this Melinda Qin. There’s the tight-beam data set, packed full of all kinds of stuff. I run it through the sifters, making certain it’s free of bugs. Half a million dollar ferries, remember?

  The station’s entire collected information unfolds on my screen. Official logs, sensor records, reports on biological samples, videos and holos of creatures I’ve never seen before—all of them with six-legs, from burly furred mammals to sleek, color-shifting reptiles.

  MarkTel comms jockeys are authorized to inspect the contents of high-volume data sets that are generated by officials of the Realm of Five. Qin and her scientists fit the bill. It’s a holdover from the days when the king’s secret police kept tabs on everyone and everything. I finger the bulge of a metal crucifix beneath my shirt. They kept tabs on some of us in particular, as my parents constantly remind me.