Ingenious
Barrie Farris
Copyright © 2019 by Barrie Farris
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Natasha Snow Designs @natashasnow.com
Beta reading by Leslie Copeland at LesCourt Services Editing and Proofread By M.A. Hinkle at LesCourt Services
Format by Leslie Copeland at LesCourt Services
www.lescourtauthorservices.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Natasha Snow, you worked your magic. The cover is beautiful.
I owe a big thank you to Leslie Copeland for her amazing feedback and taking me through each step to publication. I thought I'd be climbing Machu Picchu. She laughed and showed me the elevator.
Thank you, M. A. Hinkle for the extra care.
Heartfelt thanks to Pam Ebeler @undividedediting.com for the additional beta read when I got cold feet.
Finally, thanks to my wonderful husband who told me to quit dreaming about the plot, park my butt in a chair, and type the words. I'm so glad you didn't go into cardiac arrest when you read the first chapter and realized I had switched from traditional romance to something different. Heh. Loved the expression on your face.
Chapter One
Quiggs skipped athletic training again, grabbed a carton of salted nuts from his roommate’s stash, and headed to the library. Why waste time toning his body when his inheritance and superior mind guaranteed him a marriage contract before he graduated? Cadets graduating without a marriage contract served in the military or as a concubine for three years—both services requiring fit, trained bodies. Quiggs could waddle like a stuffed gull and still win the hand of the prettiest deb in the Triangle.
With men outnumbering women ten to one, the academy trained its cadets to revere the female sex. Yet the mysteries of female plumbing sparked more fear in Quiggs than curiosity.
Presently, the only mysteries arousing his curiosity were locked inside the library’s ancient tomes.
Quiggs puffed up three flights of stairs to the library, pausing on the landing to catch his breath. He pinched an inch of belly through his white tee. Maybe he should’ve run laps around the arena this morning.
But the sunshine through the library’s corner windows warmed his favorite table, and the tangy rinse on the mopped stone floor muted the stench drifting in from the canal. Why waste a splendid morning on athletics when today might be the day he found the page explaining how to kill the vines?
Quiggs’s mother and three fathers had discovered the crate of tomes in a storage bunker during a botanical expedition in the outland before he was born. The tomes seemed to contain a detailed history of technology to ensure the survival of the colonists in the event of another series of catastrophes wrecking Earth’s habitat.
Too bad their descendants didn’t understand a single word.
A rebellion had broken out after the construction of the triangular canal and its three port cities. The original structures had withstood the fighting, but the population was decimated, and fanatics had ravaged the library and engineering rooms. A century later, their history erased, the survivors had developed a separate language, mathematics, and science.
The tomes had baffled scholars until Quiggs had enrolled in Port Memphis Academy when he was eight. Ten years later, he had roughly deciphered six of the tomes and had modified the simplest inventions using the Triangle’s limited resources.
His unique mind exasperated his professors whenever Quiggs tried to explain his methods. The alien symbols coalesced for him. It helped he remembered everything he read and effortlessly pulled the pieces together to complete the puzzles. His professors called him a throwback to the ancestors. His classmates called him a conceited prick.
Quiggs pulled a tome from a shelf marked Reserved for Cadet Quiggs Fallon. The tome was one of the thicker ones, leathery brown with metal rings binding waxy pages resistant to moisture and rot. As part of their master plan, the ancestors had created virtually indestructible materials in their underground labs. Port Memphis Academy, located at the southernmost point of the canal, was the best example. It had withstood eight centuries of cadets. Like all the original buildings, the academy was constructed of glass as hard as metal and beige stone a sledgehammer couldn’t crack. Embedded in the ceiling and walls were blue veins acting like light sensors. Whatever the power source, the sensors functioned as well now as they had when installed.
Quiggs had tried to get to the workings inside the walls of his barracks with a sledgehammer when he was a sixth-year cadet and ended up with splints all the way up his elbows. The wall hadn’t been scratched.
Sadly, the academy was built to house ten times the number of current cadets. Enrollment had steadily declined the last century. He’d heard rumors the Ruling Mothers were raising the mandatory number of children per marriage from four to five.
Quiggs leaned back in a chair with his feet on the table and the tome balanced on his belly. He nibbled nuts, licking salt off his fingers while he thumbed through the odd waxy pages for references to the broadleaved purple vine.
In other tomes he had deciphered methods of processing the sap, leaves, roots, and pods of the bioengineered vine into fuel, clothing, medicines, food. There was even a formula to distill wine from the purple sap—big, big mistake, and prohibited on pain of death today.
Quiggs had yet to find a reference on how to kill the vine. The ancestors had bioengineered it to adapt and flourish in the barren expanse of the outland across the canal. When the colonists emerged from their underground shelter, it provided a simple, self-sustaining existence—a masterpiece of bioengineering to support them while they converted the interior of the Triangle into farmland.
Then the damn fucker had turned against the colonists, and nothing killed it.
The vine spread across the vast outland, becoming an unnavigable jungle with a towering canopy and tangled roots. It fostered vicious insects. Harvesting was dangerous and also less productive. If not for goats grazing the fringe along the outbank, the vine would have crossed the canal and infested the Triangle’s precious soil.
Quiggs’s parents had theorized the vines’ engineering perceived frequent harvesting as a threat to its survival. In retaliation, it produced a substance affecting the minds of citizens who ingested the wine distilled from its fermented sap—mainly men because women abstained from wine during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Many women were slaughtered when they protested the drinking.
The insanity infected the bloodline of male offspring, and generations of sons turn
ed violent at the onset of puberty. When women wrested control of the Triangle, humans were on the verge of extinction. Sporadic rampages continued to break out until only stringent training suppressed the stain. Laws were passed, underscored with convoluted rules for behavior. All males required diligent guidance. The Ruling Mothers sequestered boys in the academy from the time they were eight until they graduated at twenty. Failure to graduate got a cadet executed.
Quiggs remembered kissing his mother goodbye the day he enrolled, the petal smoothness of her sun-freckled cheeks, the salty taste of her tears, the scent of her lavender sachet. He never saw her again. His parents vanished during a botanical expedition before he turned eleven, the age when a cadet was considered safely indoctrinated and allowed his first visit from family.
Stupid miserable rules. Quiggs hadn’t set foot outside the academy since he’d enrolled. The Ruling Mothers isolated sexually inactive cadets like himself from the public, and the laws tasked the academy with shielding an inactive cadet from sexual stimuli until the cadet’s acorn bloomed naturally into wood. After a cadet registered active, the Ruling Mothers required the academy to stringently manage healthy sexual releases in the sex clinic. Because of his classification, Quiggs required a chaperone to enter unrestricted areas within the building. He lowered his eyes when visitors approached.
The laws were a steaming pile of goat shit.
Quiggs thumbed the pages, scanning for vine, and stopped at an illustration resembling an inverted teardrop with a basket. Looked interesting. What did it do? He enjoyed a tickle of superiority at how easily he deciphered the description.
The inverted teardrop was a balloon filled with hot air fueled by a furnace. Suspended by cables to the balloon was a basket for passengers. The flying balloon lifted people into the clouds and traveled extended distances. As he worked out the schematics on the following pages, his pulse quickened. Sewing panels of flame-proofed material with vents was doable. He could inflate the balloon with hot air funneled from the boiling springs beneath the city. Configuring a furnace to keep the balloon filled for lengthy travel was challenging but also doable.
Feeding the furnace? Not doable without inventing an intense but compact fuel.
He drifted into one of his deep mental fogs, configuring a small combustion furnace that wouldn’t blast him into a thousand pieces when he dropped a lit fuel stick down the chute.
When a heavy hand shook his shoulder, Quiggs jerked. He sensed he’d spent little time in this fog but was never certain if minutes or hours had passed when he emerged. The younger cadets loved to play pranks when they caught him buried in one.
“Dean Cagney requests your presence,” a gruff voice said. The messenger was Cressley, ex-military with a left eyepatch and a hook for his left hand.
Quiggs returned the tome to its slot. “What does Dean Cagney want with me?” As if he didn’t know. He turned eighteen today.
“Didn’t say. Ducked his head out of the office in the middle of a conference and snapped an order to fetch you.”
Quiggs pretended he didn’t anticipate a surprise party with iced cakes and his first ale to celebrate his coming of age. He followed Cressley to the top floor of the administrative wing. In the wide hallway outside the dean’s office, Quiggs signed in at the desk with an elderly monitor. Every able male in the Triangle worked. Idleness tempted forth deviant behavior, which was a death sentence.
Cressley left to escort a senior from the athletic field to the medical clinic. With the approaching skills placements for military applicants, the competition heated up. Failure to place stuck a cadet in the concubine lottery.
Waiting for his name to be called, Quiggs strolled down the hall reading the news slates displayed on easels. Port Paducah and Port Lourdes reported no recent sightings of ferals. The Herders Guild opened nominations for officers. Port Memphis increased the fine on urination off the dock. Commander Max Bronn visited the Academy tomorrow.
Since he was a sequestered inactive, Quiggs had never crossed paths with the youngest commander to serve the Triangle. Who better to fight ferals than a quarter-breed? With over fifty kills to his credit, the man was a legend at twenty-four, cheered wherever he made an appearance. For each kill, his manservant embroidered a tiny red skull on one of the wide cuffs of the Commander’s navy jacket.
The cadets fell all over themselves for a close view.
Quiggs stopped at a glass-fronted cabinet with shelves of plaques etched with the names of Academic Champions stretching back eight centuries, the Fallon name prominent. He anticipated his seventh title at the end of this school year, plus two more before graduating at twenty. On the opposite wall was a cabinet for the plaques of past Athletic Champions, the Fallon name noticeably absent. Commander Bronn had held the title of Athletic Champion for an unparalleled record of eight years. He’d graduated undefeated in all competitions.
Quiggs anticipated beating him by winning nine championships to Commander Bronn’s eight.
An example of Brain winning over Bronn.
His crack of laughter at the silly pun earned a shush from the elderly monitor.
Quiggs folded his hands in apology and moved toward the end of the hall. Prominently displayed on an easel between a pair of tall windows was a portrait of newly elected Governor Anne Lyre with her family.
The governor posed regally on an ornate gilt chair with First Husband William seated beside her. Second Husband Cyrus stood behind to her right, Third Husband Palmer to her left. Her four unmarried daughters sat at her feet in extravagant pools of pink skirts.
Quiggs grinned. The youngest with the pug nose was definitely Cyrus’s offspring. The other three had William’s blond good looks. After her previous third husband fell off a flatboat into the canal, Governor Lyre had married the gorgeous dark-haired Palmer with his sulky mouth and liquid brown eyes. Bad timing for a plunge. A passing knot of eels had devoured him. Poor guy. The campaigning widow grieved a month before replacing him with Palmer.
And poor, poor Palmer, married off to the governor hours after he graduated from the academy last year. Rumor had it his mother was appointed Secretary of the Treasury for her consent.
Quiggs pitied Palmer. He pitied any third husband who was more of a toy for the other husbands if the wife had borne the mandatory four children as Governor Lyre had. After four—soon to be five if the law changed—a wife was free to cease conjugal duties and campaign for a seat in the Assembly.
Because the ratio of males to females was ten to one, two-thirds of the male population never touched the soft curves of a wife. At the turn of the second century, to prevent sexual disharmony from disturbing the peace, the Assembly of Ruling Mothers enacted laws encouraging men to form same-sex relationships, with wedlock between two men as respected as marriage. In compliance with the law, the academy trained its cadets to accept same-sex relationships. During their junior and senior years, cadets enjoyed appointments with each other in the sex clinic. When disharmony persisted, the Assembly mandated the concubine lottery.
The dean’s door opened, and Dr. Keith, in charge of medical, and Professor Hines, the chief therapist of the academy’s sex clinic, walked out. Both were flushed and clearly agitated, their unbuttoned white coats flapping behind them. They saw Quiggs and stopped, their expressions grim.
Well, fuck. Now Quiggs suspected what the conference was about.
Dr. Keith stormed over as if he’d like to grip a fistful of Quiggs’s white tee and shake him like a shoe with an irritating pebble lodged in the toe. The doctor’s dignified face puffed up in outrage, his fluffy gray side whiskers twitching from the strain. If Quiggs hooked the doctor’s mouth over a funnel into a flying balloon, he’d have a ready source of hot air for flight. He cracked a slight smile at the mental image, and the doctor’s temper exploded.
“You egotistical, stubborn brat! You think losing my position as Chief of Staff is amusing?”
A blob of spittle struck Quiggs’s chin. He let it slide. His medical c
ondition wasn’t hurting anyone. Why the sudden urgency to cure it?
“No more excuses, Cadet Quiggs. You will not cost me my position.” Dr. Keith strode from the hall, fists clenched at his sides before Quiggs could argue. He wiped his chin off with the back of his hand.
Professor Hines had counseled every cadet enrolled in Port Memphis Academy the last thirty years, including each of Quiggs’s fathers. The professor’s broad face, with his soft brown eyes always crinkled in a kind smile, was serious now. “Please cooperate, Quiggs. The dean has also threatened to demote me if you aren’t in the active barracks by next month.”
Quiggs gazed at him, confused. “But I’m not stubborn. I practice the exercises you prescribed. Nothing happens.”
Professor Hines patted Quiggs’s shoulder. “I suggested a new therapy to Dean Cagney and Dr. Keith. Something special for the academy’s most decorated cadet.” He lowered his voice. “It’s time we bend a few rules.”
Quiggs was all in for bending the rules to become an active. “Like what?” he whispered.
Professor Hines nudged Quiggs toward the dean’s office. “We will discuss the details later. The dean is waiting. Don’t antagonize him. Focus, listen, nod.”
Quiggs thought of the many times his logic had worn the dean’s voice down to a wisp.
“Lose the smile, Quiggs,” the professor reminded him before walking away.
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