The Simmering Seas

by Frank Kennedy

  But this strange architecture – impractical in every sense – paled against a tiny glass case which sat at Ryllen’s eye level, also on the central shaft’s swivel. It was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and yet dazzled the chamber with a dreamlike glow.

  It spoke to him. Or so he sensed.

  Ryllen drew close. Only then did he recognize a clear pattern inside the cube. A star, deep red and throbbing, hovered at the center. It emitted thin rays to each of the eight corners.

  He was terrified, and he was exhilarated. Somehow, he knew what this was. And yes, it was speaking to him.

  “It’s called the Splinter. Take it now.”

  What?

  That voice did not come from inside the cube. He swung about and raised his weapons, prepared to fire.

  “You’re out of time. Take it. Run.”

  Ryllen’s hands were hot on the trigger buttons, but he didn’t fire.

  The speaker was Ryllen’s age, a young man who wore the Anglo-European features of an Earth-born. Blood poured from his left ear, and he held his right arm tight against his body, as if it were broken.

  “Who are you?”

  The speaker didn’t advance. In the same instant, he appeared to phase-shift. Ryllen realized he was staring at a hologram. Whether it was a live transmission or a recording, he had no idea.

  “Everything starts here,” the speaker continued. “Take the Splinter and run, or the rest will be lost.”

  Thunder cracked the night outside the sphere. Then again.

  “They’re here,” the speaker said, confirming he was live. “You have to take the Splinter. They know how to kill immortals.”

  Ryllen never experienced a feeling of speechlessness until now.

  “How …? Who are you? How do you know about …?”

  Too late. The speaker phase-shifted and disappeared.

  Commotion outside.

  Ryllen moved on instinct. He grabbed the glowing cube which, much to his shock, neither electrocuted him nor resisted his effort. He tucked it into a pocket and raced down the stairs.

  The quiet standstill of the port turned to chaos. Ham ordered the team into defensive positions as two Scramjets – relics of the Unification Guard – descended over HCC. Ryllen caught his eye.

  “RJ, now. We have to move.”

  But it wasn’t so easy. The docile creatures who fell to their knees so easily when the team first arrived now turned aggressively toward Ryllen. A black woman, dressed in the flamboyant colors of the planet Boer, pointed to Ryllen and screamed.

  “He has it! He’s stealing the Splinter. Take him!”

  The red glow was visible, as the cube did not fit entirely into the pocket. None of the ten who rushed Ryllen displayed weapons, but he reacted the only way he knew.

  He fired.

  Ryllen was always a good shot, even in moments of desperation. No one reached him before they died.

  “RJ, now!”

  The team was racing toward the parking lodge as the Scramjets swung low. The twins, Joa and Jai, unleashed their collider pistols against the ships, which did not return fire despite the weapons array under their bellies. Did the Scramjets possess one of the Guard’s more feared weapons, the ovoid energy slew? A literal rain of fire. No one waited to find out, especially Ryllen. Fire was one way to kill an immortal for good.

  As Ryllen sprinted, the survivors on the port appeared discombobulated. Some jumped aboard the sphere, while others followed Sho Parke’s lead and dashed toward HCC’s main building.

  He caught up with the team as Ham delivered orders.

  “Meet at the raft,” he told Mei’s group of three plus Po and Myra. “I’m going to divert their attention.”

  “No,” Mei said. “We all go together.”

  “This gives us the best chance. I’m not kicking off tonight. Not after what I’ve seen. If you lose my signal, shove off. Contact the Queen Mab. Lan will bring her in close. Otherwise, I’ll pick you up.”

  “This will take too long, Ham. They’re landing.”

  Indeed, one Scramjet was settling in fifty meters away. The other hovered, creeping toward the sphere.

  Ham smiled. “No worries. I’m quite adept at hacking a sedan.”

  Mei hated retreating, which Ryllen learned during his time with Green Sun. But she followed the order and led the others into the thick tropical landscape.

  Ryllen didn’t need to say a word. He shared a nod with Ham and raced into the parking lodge. As they entered, an explosion threw them off their feet. A yellow cloud enveloped the night.

  The hovering Scramjet destroyed Invictus. The other attack ship, however, opened its bay doors. Tall humans in black armor with insectoid helmets emerged, scattering in every direction.

  “Who are they?” Ryllen shouted as they rose to their feet and raced to the nearest luxury sedan.

  “Not sure,” Ham said, opening his hand-comm and beginning the hack. “Not soldiers of the Guard,” he said, as the program advanced. “But as tall. Maybe …”

  “Who?”

  Ham responded, but Ryllen didn’t hear the answer.

  Ryllen went blind.

  Instead, the cube sang to him. It was a melody he knew … something from early in his childhood. A sweet …

  Lullaby?

  No. Something else.

  And then he emerged in another place.

  He was flying above the ocean, his hands at the steering arms.

  Wait. What?

  It felt right. It felt like home.

  He was piloting a two-seat rifter. More refined than the modified machine he used to race around Pinchon.

  The sea sparkled beneath Huryo’s gaze. He held up the cube they called Splinter. The tiny rays emitting from the center …

  Singularity. It’s a singularity.

  How did he know?

  The rays color-shifted as he turned the cube in his palm.

  Ryllen felt at peace.

  He was almost home again.

  The ground shook, and Ham shouted in his ear.

  The sedan was properly hacked, its gate open.

  “Now!” Ham shouted.

  “No.” Ryllen looked around.

  There, off to a corner. A rifter.

  “Go,” he told Ham. “I’m supposed to … Just go, Ham. I’ll see you soon. Go.”

  “In now, RJ!”

  “I can’t explain. Look, if this goes to shit, I get a second chance. I always get a second chance. Go!”

  He didn’t wait for Ham’s response.

  Rifter bubbles were not difficult to hack open. The phasic driver he kept in his utility belt did the trick. The real curve involved the AI nav panel. Many private owners locked it to their genetic signature or voice command. This rifter carried the HCC logo on its side, which pleased Ryllen. It was likely a grounds vehicle, perhaps for maintenance staff.

  He punched initiator commands into the panel while watching Ham depart the lodge with success. The sedan took a sharp curve once clear of the lodge gates, no laser fire pursuing the vehicle.

  The nav panel activated.

  Ryllen opened his hand-comm and threw the Queen Mab’s coordinates into the nav. If the course exceeded the rifter’s protocols, the panel would shut down instantly. It did no such thing.

  He removed the cube from his pocket and admired its beauty. Then he grabbed the steering arms and ignited the Carbedyne bars below.

  He shot toward the gate as a phalanx of black-armored soldiers filled it. They aimed blasters. There was nothing he could do.

  Ryllen closed his eyes and trusted to hope.

  He cleared the gate without a single shot fired.

  Who were they? Why did they stand down?

  “They had me. I was easy pickings.”

  Again, the cube sang to him. He listened to the melody and felt at peace. Ryllen turned the maneuvering arms to a course off island.

  As he cleared the coast, and the sparkling ocean under Huryo laid out before him, Ryllen’s pulse s
ettled at last.

  “What for all the rings just happened?”

  It was too much. Nothing compared to this night, not even Ronin Swallows. He homed in on the speaker’s words inside the sphere:

  “Everything starts here. Take the Splinter and run, or the rest will be lost.”

  His questions arrived at a furious pace, none accompanied by answers. He knew the most important: What does the Splinter do? How did the speaker know I’m immortal? All else formed a corollary.

  Only for a second did he remember leaving bodies on the deck.

  “OK, asshole. Deep breath. You got through the shit. Next step.”

  He doubted the rifter had enough juice to reach the nearest island, let alone have any shot at Pinchon. The only choice was resetting to the Queen Mab’s course and establishing a connection on a back-door channel through the AI. Unregged comm shots, as they were called in the lingo, weren’t his specialty, but he mucked his way through a few while training for Green Sun. Now, he just needed to remember the procedure. He dared not contact the sub on an open frequency.

  As he began his work, the cube’s glow intensified. He lifted it.

  The sun appeared, and Ryllen shielded his eyes.

  Seconds later, the sun was swallowed into the night.

  A sphere hovered less than a hundred meters ahead, its reflective bands rotating in opposite directions, its oblong door open.

  “No. This can’t be real.”

  A silhouetted figure stood in the door against a sunset red background, as if holding on for dear life. Ryllen saw no more detail, but he didn’t have to. Instinct painted a clear but impossible picture.

  Rays of uneven light raced along the bands as if carried on a rushing river. And then, a single beam broke away. It curved downward before shifting course.

  “Cudfrucker.”

  Ryllen dropped the cube into his lap and banked, but he never stood a chance. Up close, in the last second of coherence, he saw a fireball.

  The rifter disintegrated. Metal impaled him from behind and ejected through his stomach. Then he looked upon Huryo for the last time.

  Ryllen was dead before he crashed into the sea.

  Exogenesis

  Artemis Station

  Planetoid Y-14, Oorton System

  Standard Year (SY) 5364

  E XETER WOOLSEY NEVER ASKED WHY he killed the woman who adopted him at his most desperate hour. One standard year later, he’d all but forgotten about it. Whenever the memory did arrive – always at the most inconvenient moments – it dashed through his life in a blur. The proper blend of neurotoxins mixed into her evening café, then a gentle goodbye. Amayas performing the autopsy and announcing she suffered from a genetic defect in her heart.

  Simple, Exeter concluded. The necessary thing is the simplest.

  “We can never compromise the project,” Amayas reminded him in a quiet moment after the cremation. “Half measures open doors for the enemy. Understand?”

  Mother died because she threatened the project.

  Exeter did not need specifics.

  Doubt was now an unacceptable concept at Artemis. The future of the alliance belonged to the devoted.

  Exeter experienced enough in the past year to know the sheer wondrous possibilities that laid ahead, but he also realized the alliance would face enormous headwinds after the formal proposals were submitted to each colonial ally. The price of a permanent place at this galactic table might challenge their resolve.

  And so, the time of negotiations began. Missions to indoctrinate new clients were placed on hold. This meant all the delegates who represented the so-called “first wave” returned to Artemis to establish a foundation. Exeter watched these meetings from his new position in Command & Control. He was tasked to oversee base security for second shift, which primarily meant keeping an eye on orbiting ships.

  The discussions were often tense but always concluding in the Inventor’s favor. Who dared to step out of line now? Who dared blockade a path to true self-sufficiency and domination?

  “Remember,” Amayas told every delegate, “I chose your world among ten. The others will never become a part of what we have, but they will watch your rise with envy.”

  And then the delegates left, taking their proposals back to their ethnic factions and government allies.

  This was not, however, as simple a proposition with the final delegation, for these were not sovereign ethnics. As Amayas predicted when the Earth war ended, breakaway factions of defeated Chancellors were bound to make a play for Artemis. He invited them here through an elaborate network of contacts.

  They were nomads, having left the Earth system rather than acceding to terms of surrender. Their numbers were few – estimates ranged to less than five thousand – and military resources were paltry, but the wealth was undeniable. In the final weeks of the war, as defeat appeared inevitable, families dissolved their credit holdings on Earth and transferred them to off-book trading privateers. Leaving the system meant they were fugitives and homeless; none dared to seek asylum on a colony for fear of retribution from indigos. They resupplied their ships through colonial transports using drop runs into uninhabited systems off the Fulcrum.

  The Inventor won them over two ways. Primarily, he presented an option less distasteful than any other. Secondarily, they believed he was, in fact, a rogue Chancellor. Amayas never admitted to this, though Exeter and Katherine always assumed as much. His height and body mass bore the signatures of a man who served in the Unification Guard. They guessed his face transplant hid such identity.

  “The man I was died long ago,” he told them in the early days. “You believe in the man I’ve become, or you do not.”

  They never again questioned the Inventor’s background.

  The Chancellors were convinced Amayas was one of them, and they used this assumption to build a case for an outsized role in the alliance. They were, after all, providing as much funding as all the indigo factions combined. Their credits went into design, purchase, and construction of new ships at isolated locations across the former Collectorate. They allowed Amayas to use Artemis Station rent-free despite their claim to ownership – a dubious argument given how it was abandoned at the end of brontinium production decades ago.

  Their central argument, however, went to genetics. Exeter watched with keen interest as the delegation from three nomad ships made their case before the Inventor.

  “You ask us to be egalitarians,” the lead Chancellor, Roe Harkness, told Amayas. The Chancellors dispensed with pseudo identities used by the ethnics. “In this, you insist we put aside three millennia of unchallenged supremacy among the stock of humanity. You insist we share all resources – financial, military, and technological. You insist we share commands and political leadership based upon meritorious or popular claims rather than preordained commission.

  “You insist we breed with them and defile the genetic markers which separated our caste since humankind took to space. You say that by doing these things, we will achieve our reward and our redemption. But what you do not say, Inventor, is the most likely outcome: The Chancellor as a breed will vanish from history. Can your paradise justify a loss so devastating?”

  The four of them sat at a round table in the demonstration lab, three cubes hovering at the center. Their pink glow and geometric perfection often left delegates so awestruck, they assented to the Inventor’s terms in short order. Today, the three Chancellors – all of them experienced the cube’s potential first-hand – did not appear locked in a loving gaze. Amayas never took his eyes off the glowing cubes when he replied.

  “I am fascinated by pre-history,” the Inventor said. “Many who worshipped the Divine believed in Heaven and Earth. There were so-called children of God who watched over their Father’s creations. These angels were benevolent but also arrogant creatures.”

  Roe Harkness interrupted. “Your analogy is irrelevant. We are discussing issues of genetics.”

  “As am I.” The Inventor tapped the
table twice and resumed. “In the mythology of the Divine, some angels rebelled against their Father. They were cast out. Fallen to the Earth. Others to a netherworld deep below. Some sought redemption for their error. Others remade themselves into new, destructive creatures. But as I understand the text, these fallen angels were rarely redeemed. And when they were – given new wings, I believe – this occurred after acts of great sacrifice. Lineage alone did not save them.

  “Understand this: You are not fallen angels who deserve restoration into Heaven. You have done nothing selfless, nor have you sacrificed. What you have been is eminently stupid. You cling to the idea that the Chancellory will be reborn by a few because it was originally birthed by a few. Earth is no longer a primitive world ripe for military conquest, and the species extends across nine hundred light-years. If you resist on the principle of genetics, your legacy ends here.”

  Exeter saw the Chancellors squirm as they glanced at each other. Amayas predicted the dialogue might turn to this topic.

  “Do I hear an implied threat?” Roe said, her jowls firm.

  “You hear the truth,” Amayas replied. “The way forward is to remake yourselves and dispense with claims of supremacy.”

  “If I may,” said another Chancellor, Benjamin Hanover. “I speak for my ship when I say our people are tired of living like refugees. They want a home and peaceful co-existence. They will not insist on genetic leverage. However, they will expect privileges in return for the collective wealth they poured into this project. What assurances can you offer in this regard?”

  Amayas considered the question with a lingering smile before throwing open a series of holowindows. Schematics of new warships, the proposed constitution of the new alliance, trade routes and economic growth projections, and a whole host of specialized tech geared toward the colonies danced above the table.

  “These are the best assurances,” the Inventor said. “In sum, they represent a realignment of interstellar commerce. A new model, if you will. Fairer. And yes, egalitarian. All who work in service of this new reality will achieve a comfortable status.”