Hi darlins!
Yes, it's a Hadrian's Colony day. No, I don't have it. I need brain space to plot and my brain has been maxed out lately from many, many things vying for attention, and I don't want to do the story a disservice. So! I'm going to let you read the beginning of Falling to Dark instead, a very different sci-fi story I'm currently writing for my Patreon. I hope you enjoy it, and I should be back to regular programming next week.
Falling to Dark
Photo by Toby Elliott
Prologue
From where he lay on top of the coolant shed on the
western side of his compound, Ooris Zile raised his hand to the sky and traced
the tail of a falling star. He started at its most distant point, little more
than an afterimage in the deep purple of the night, then followed the trail as
it became brighter, an ember turned to a spark turned to a true flame, before
it finally plunged into the ground in a plume of fire several hundred miles
away. He felt its impact like a gentle thud in the back of his mind, another
piece of space trash coming to rest on this heap.
“Welcome to hell,” he muttered, dropping his hand to his
left temple and rubbing at the knot of tension there before turning his eyes
back to the sky and looking for another newcomer.
Stars were always falling to Dark. Every night was a panoply
of burning splendor as the massive gravitational waves caused by Dark’s five
jealous, unpredictable moons pulled bits and pieces of each other into the
planet’s orbit. They lingered in a disparate ring around the planet before time
and impact sent them blazing to the planet’s surface. Almost all of them were
immediately incinerated, not so much because of Dark’s atmosphere, which had
comparably light gravity, but because over ninety percent of Dark’s surface was
starkly unstable.
If Dark had been a planet covered in water, it would have
been prey to massive tidal waves. As it was, Dark was barely more than its own
molten core, and the gravity of its moons ensured that lava flowed constantly,
sometimes spewing into the air where it burst unpredictably through the fragile
top layer, but more frequently racing along the planet’s surface in the form of
massive molten rivers that constantly coiled, eddied, and butted up against
others.
Dark was unpredictable. Dark was dangerous.
Dark, for all its burning light, was also, well…dark.
Technologically speaking, at least. The levels of electromagnetic interference
produced by its inchoate geology was too much for most modern technologies to
overcome. Outside of the occasional eclipses that offered up a lull in the
insanity on the surface, there were only two spots on Dark that were capable of
supporting even the most rudimentary technology.
One of them was Stele, the sole city on the planet, located
at the north pole and protected by an enormous chunk of iron oxide that
resisted both melting and the inconstant pulls of gravity. It was the home of
everyone who’d ever lived through their fall to Dark, either as shipwrecked
survivors who’d been caught in the chaotic gravity waves that emanated
throughout the system, or those who’d been sent here deliberately. Stele was
ruled by one of those marooned survivors, and although it was a dire place to carve
out an existence, it had nothing on the certain death that awaited those who
lingered on the lava flows.
The only other spot on Dark that could support life and
technology was, currently, about fifty miles south of Stele. It was Ooris’s
home, his island fortress on the sea of lava, his personal palace, his staging
ground. After three years on Dark, he’d managed to insert a few creature
comforts in amongst the necessities. One of them was a still, and he groped to
his right for the cup of alcohol he knew was waiting for him there…somewhere.
Probably. He was on his third glass, or was it his fourth? Either way, he’d
refilled it, he was sure, he just had to—ah. There it was.
Ooris grabbed it in clumsy fingers and raised the cup to his
lips, then tilted his head and poured the vile brew back as quickly as
possible. This wasn’t a sipping whiskey, after all, or a delicate ice wine
meant to be savored after a meal. His rotgut had one task and one task only—to
fuck him up as fast as possible. And after four glasses…or was it five now…he
was well on his way. Ooris lowered the cup with a gasp at the burn and opened
his watering eyes just in time to see a new star enter the night sky.
Oh, lovely. This one burned large and bright white, which
meant it had very few impurities and was going to land nearby,
relatively speaking. Ooris toasted the falling detritus with his empty glass as
it finally broke into the lower atmosphere and—
Vanished?
“What the hell?” That didn’t happen. These things were
predictable in the extreme—they burned until they hit the ground, at which
point most of them floated atop the lava until it finally burned them to a
crisp or, on rare occasions, were caught in an eddy and completely subsumed.
Either way, it ought to be visible, it hadn’t hit the ground yet. Unless…Ooris
squinted, forcing his vision sharper, and was just barely able to make out
something lilting through the distant air. Lilting…that motion meant a
canopy, which meant this falling star had a parachute, which meant it wasn’t
another hunk of space junk at all. It was a ship.
Ships meant people. Better yet, ships meant tech. Fresh
tech to grow Ooris’s home with, to hasten his inevitable escape. Maybe he could
turn forty-seven more years of exile into forty-five, or forty-two if it was a
modern vessel. But what kind of modern ship bothered with the Dark system? On
the contrary, everyone avoided it because the gravity was so unpredictable it
could absolutely ruin a flight plan.
Probably another exile, then. That meant shitty tech, hardly
worth bothering about, although better than negotiating with Rovus for more,
but…
Ooris felt it when this ship touched down on the lava. Not
because it hit with a bang, but because the presence on board was enough to
make a gentle touchdown feel like someone had just hammered on a gong a foot in
front of his face. Someone had arrived, someone important, someone
with a devastating amount of potential energy. It didn’t make sense; this was a
person with a Destiny, capital D. Only two other people on all of Dark felt
anything remotely like this, and one was that bastard Rovus, so he didn’t count.
What was someone so important doing on Dark, of all places?
Ooris needed to know.
And he needed to know before whoever it was either died of
the heat or was picked up by the Rovers.
Ooris closed his eyes and focused his energy inward for a
moment. It was hard to concentrate, with the blinding blue light on his left
that made true darkness seem like an impossibility these days, but he managed
it well enough to lift the haze of alcohol from his body. He was still tired,
massively dehydrated, and unrelentingly grumpy, but it would have to do.
“Striga!” he shouted as he got to his feet and jumped down
from the cooler. He headed for the antenna in the center of the compound, where
faint silver threads rotated up and over the tip of it like they were weaving
invisible cloth. “Striga, wake up!”
Ooris heard the grumble of an annoyed bot deep in the depths
of the compound and grinned even as he switched his focus to the antenna. A
single, questing silver thread broke off from the rest of them, and the
compound wobbled slightly on its hillock of dead lava before finding its
balance once more.
“Easy on,” he said to the ground beneath his feet, keeping
his sights on the thread. He used the antenna’s power and reach to push the
thread, following the feeling of this new arrival. Farther…farther…he’d pushed
out five miles already, but there was a long ways to go yet. Ten…twenty…the
headache was back with a vengeance, but Ooris ignored it.
Thirty…Forty…fifty-three. There, on the lava, mercifully
stuck to one of the small, temporary islands instead of falling prey to the
vast orange river that traveled not fifty feet away. There was the ship, modern
and sleek, full of bright and valuable technology that Ooris was already
salivating at the thought of incorporating into his compound. And there, inside
of it, struggling his way out of his seat and crawling to the surface, was a
boy…no, a man, but not by much given the smoothness of his skin and the wide,
thoughtless fear in his eyes. No adult in this system let themselves look so
perfectly innocent for long, not if they wanted to live free. And oh…
Oh, stars. He was beautiful. Rich brown skin marked with
bright gold lines, in a black suit that clung to his body like mist. Beautiful,
but also bleeding and afraid. Ooris would solve those issues quickly enough.
All he had to do was—
It felt like being hit in the face with a pillow, if that
pillow was made of sound. It knocked Ooris out of the thread, which
dematerialized immediately, and left him swaying and blinking as he clung to
the antenna in an effort to stay upright.
Something warm and hard pushed beneath his free arm,
supporting him. Ooris smiled even as he groaned. His dear pet, come to lift him
up once more. Forget what his father said about programming; some bots had more
soul than that old bastard ever could. He opened his eyes and looked at her,
then grinned fiercely at her bright yellow cluster of orbs.
“Get your dancing boots on, my darling. We’ve got a ship to
hunt down.” If they were lucky they’d get there before the Rovers did, although
given how Ooris had been knocked out of his own electromagnetic construct, he
thought they might be on the back foot there.
But that was all right. You didn’t survive this long on Dark
without learning to think quick. This prize would go to him, he was
determined. The ship, the man, all of it. He couldn’t let such riches fall into
Rovus’s hands. What a terrible waste that would be.
Sinking his focus deeper than the antenna, Ooris reached
into the heart of his compound and connected the power matrix to his array of
heat-sensitive panels. Soon he had more than enough power to activate the
secondary gyroscopes, and cumbersomely, ponderously, his home broke free
of the rock that was somewhat safely imprisoning it. The artificial gravity
generators groaned as they hoisted the compound up, but Ooris paid them no
heed. They would last. They would have to, because he was not doing
all of this shit by hand.
He set their course, ignoring the new star that fell to the
east—a common flame, a pitiful spark of light there and gone, its reflection
lingering briefly in the single new, silver hair that bloomed from his temple
like midnight’s flower.
Chapter One
It wasn’t until the scent of char bled through the impact
foam that had spewed from the safety valves inside the escape pod as soon as it
broke atmosphere that Adorn’s mind went from “you’re falling to your death
you’re going to die you’re going to die you’re going to die” to “fine, you’re
not dead yet. Now what are you going to do about it?”
Not sit immobile inside the pod until he was cooked alive,
for starters. Gaps and gorges, where had he landed?
Please not Dark. Please, not Dark, I can handle anything
but Dark.
He would have rolled his eyes at himself if they hadn’t hurt
so much. Bold thoughts for a man who couldn’t even handle defending the space
above Elethar, but that…
Not now. Adorn couldn’t look back right now. He
needed to look ahead, and that meant releasing his restraints and crawling out
of the pod to get his bearings.
Releasing the restraints was simple enough. The impact foam
was malleable to organic matter, and he easily pushed it aside to unhook the
cables that held him into his chair. It was harder to move his limbs than to
move the foam; the effect of long hours in the chair coupled with the intense
adrenaline of his planetfall had left Adorn terribly stiff. His body ached in a
way he’d never felt before, and he wondered for one fleeting, hopeful moment if
his crash landing had been what his psyche needed to finally initiate his
shift.
Adorn touched the planes of his face with shaking fingers,
and he couldn’t help the way his heart dropped when he felt completely smooth
skin. It was better this way, of course—an uncontrolled shift inside a space as
small as a pod? What if he’d become something huge? What if he’d taken a
psychic path? He could have messed everything up, could have imploded himself,
could be floating dead and frozen in the dark of space right now instead of
being…wherever he was.
Fine. This was fine. He wanted to be awake for his first
shift anyway.
If you live to see it. Get out of here.
Adorn pressed painfully to his feet and felt around for the
hatch. There was so much foam, stiff and slightly sticky and completely
disorienting…where was the damn hatch? Not here, not—ah. There. Behind
and thirty degrees up from his seat. The electronics were shot, but every
escape pod came with a manual backup. Adorn stared blearily at the handles for
a moment. Shift this one right…no, left, then twist this one right,
both hands on the big lever and pull—
An unrelenting wall of heat blasted him as the hatch was
literally torn from his hands. Adorn stared at the wavering scene of red and
black flowing sluggishly by until the pod shifted, and the molten sludge began
to seep over the edge of the door. He went from numb with incomprehension to
swearing at the revelation that he had, in fact, landed on fucking Dark.
And he’d landed in a lava flow.
That was his exit, the only way out. If he survived an
invasion, a betrayal, and a crash landing only to get burned alive, Adorn would
literally fight every one of his godly ancestors about it once he joined them.
He stepped forward, but the lava was rising quickly. He needed to block it
somehow, or find some way to shield himself from it while he climbed out.
Luckily, this riddle wasn’t a challenge to answer. Adorn
ripped at the foam around him, tearing it from the walls and molding it against
his lower legs and feet until he was wearing a facsimile of boots, enormous and
clunky though they were. The foam was incredibly heat resistant, and he watched
as the first little flow of lava ran into the pod, hit a clump of foam, and
stopped there, sputtering and indignant, its red veins going silver as its
quest to devour was stymied.
Good. He grabbed another piece and held it over his
mouth and nose to act as a filter, then stepped over the lave and, clinging to
the top edge of the door, pulled himself out and on top of the pod.
The heat was almost enough to prostrate him. His pod wasn’t
directly in the lava flow—not entirely, at least. Instead it was impaled on a
tiny, rocky island of what looked like basalt—the fire river’s last
incarnation, perhaps. On every side, orange and red flowed by in a mockery of
water. Adorn’s eyes burned from the heat and the acrid gasses, and he swiveled
his head wildly to look for an escape route. There had to be something he could
do, someplace he could reach that would be safe—even if just for a second
before he had to leap again.
Or you could just do what everyone wanted you to do in
the first place and die quietly, alone and forgotten by your clan, your people,
and your empire.
Adorn gritted his teeth, his heart filling with the
righteous fury that had helped him survive seven assassination attempts so far.
Eight, if this could be included. I’ll show them all. I’ll prove to Father
that I’m the best of them. He was going to live, damn it, and rub his
siblings’ faces in his survival if it was the last thing he did.
There! His surroundings wavered in every
direction, but over there the color, at least, was black. That might mean
slower-moving lava, or it might even mean something solid to settle on. It was
hard to tell how far away it was with the heat and fumes playing havoc with his
senses, but as the pod shifted beneath him, Adorn knew he’d run out of time.
Decision made, he crouched down, rested one hand lightly on the pod’s surface
to help push off, then leapt as hard as he could for his best chance at solid
ground.
It wasn’t solid. It wasn’t liquid, which was what
saved his life, but it wasn’t solid. His right foot hit and immediately sunk
into the stiff, crunchy surface layer of lava. Adorn almost lost his balance,
arms wheeling for a frantic moment, but managed to stay upright and get his
left foot ahead of the other. It stuck as well.
Fucking move faster!
Biting down on the foam mask to hold it over his mouth, he
grabbed the tops of his makeshift boots and yanked them up along with his feet,
stepping doggedly forward. Each stride cost him a layer of foam, and before
long the heat in the soles of his feat was almost unbearable.
Just a little farther…just a little farther—
“Reach up, freshie!”
Adorn blinked his bleary, watering eyes upward toward the
auditory hallucination he was having. Ah, it was a visual hallucination, too—a
man in thick, leathery layers wearing a full face mask dangling from a metal
basket which hung down on a chain. But where did the chain go?
“Reach, you fool!”
Why not? His boots were done for anyway. Adorn reached up,
half expecting to touch nothing but air, and instead found his wrist gripped so
firmly that he could feel the flesh bruise. “Up, up!” the man shouted, and a
second later they were being swung through the air, around and around until
they finally set down on actual ground, firm and steady under
Adorn’s painful feet. The moment his savior let go of his arm, his legs gave
out from under him. Racking coughs escaped through his spit-slick mask, and he
thought he might choke on it before someone jerked it off his face.
Shit, that was worse! Adorn reached up and grabbed
for the hand that had taken it, catching it in his faltering grip as he stared
up into eyes that gleamed like copper. The eyes were all he could see of the
thief’s face, but those were enough to know that he was dealing with one of his
own kind: a Verenge.
Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe he won’t recognize me. Few
people recognizes Adorn for who he was as a person, but as an institution,
that was another matter altogether. He felt his heart sink as those copper eyes
widened, and a thumb stretched out and rubbed against the lightning-bolt
traceries of gold on his face. Damn it, he knew. He knew.
Adorn dropped the man’s hand and jerked away, but he didn’t
have the energy to go far. For all that he wasn’t on active lava anymore, the
heat was still oppressive. He had no sweat left to give, and Adorn felt his
body temperature rising as the tiny hairs in his nostrils began to crisp. He
tried to get to his feet, staggered back onto his knees, and then—
The clunky mask came down over his head with a thud,
covering him completely down to the shoulders. It smelled just as foul inside,
but there was air being pumped into it—soothing, cool air. Foul or not, it was
the most delicious thing Adorn had ever tasted.
“Feisty little freshie!” someone yelled toward the Verenge.
“Not many have the energy to try and run once we get ‘em out! Good for the
pits, eh?”
“Or the pleasure houses,” another leather-wrapped rescuer
shouted with an audible leer. This one had four arms, two coming out of the
shoulders and two more jutting from the lower abdomen. A Quilothid. Its skinny,
short lower legs bent low as it made an obscene rutting gesture, and several of
the others laughed.
“Whatever Rovus wants for him,” the Verenge called out, then
knelt down in front of Adorn and said, very quietly, “Your title won’t help you
here, Dulius. Don’t use it.”
“What’s the whispering about?” the Quilothid demanded,
stumping over toward them. “Not staking a claim, are you, Wing?”
“Who’s got the money for a claim on a freshie, huh?” Wing
replied casually, straightening up. He extended a hand down to Adorn, who took
it after a moment. He wavered a bit once he was on his feet, but his head was
already clearing thanks to the helmet. He turned around and watched as the
dangling daredevil who’d rescued him attached a magnahook to the top of his
pod, which was already a third of the way consumed by the lava. The hook
extended up to the end of a miniature crane which looked like it had punched a
stability spike into the basalt, holding it steady. It lifted up, the chain
straining for a moment, and then finally the pod came free.
The crew swarmed the pod the second it touched down, one
spraying it with something that put out the flames as the next came in with a
sledgehammer and began to beat away the lava still clinging to its surface. Two
more got to work with atomic torches, peeling the outer shielding on the pod
away like it was paper and throwing it toward the crane, where another two
people stacked it into a trailer.
“Rovus’s gonna love this shit,” the Quilothid said with a
satisfied grunt. “A freshie and an intact pod, good bargain.” He
looked back at Adorn with squinty eyes. “Don’t have to take him back quite this
pretty. We’ve got time to break him in a bit before we get back to Stele.”
“Take a healthy freshie and mess him up before Rovus gets
his share first?” Wing scoffed and shook his head. “That’s asking for trouble,
Frith.”
“It’s perks! Perks of being a Rover!” He scuttled a little
closer to Adorn, one hand reaching out like he was ready to jerk him in close
and make a run for it. “You’re new to the crew, Wing, so I’ll give you a pass
for now, but you gotta learn how these things work. Rovus gets the best, but
Rovers get the rest, y’understand? That includes first touch, long as we keep
the freshie mostly intact.”
Wing held himself uncertainly, glancing between Adorn and
the Quilothid. As covertly as he could, Adorn slid his left hand down the
outside of his thigh until his fingertips brushed the dagger he’d had there
before he crashed. Feeling the hilt was reassuring, even if he wasn’t sure how
long he’d be able to hold onto it.
As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.
The Quilothid sidled closer, finally reaching out and
grasping Adorn’s upper arm greedily, reeling him in close. A second later he
reeled back with a screech, clasping his dangling, bloody wrist where Adorn had
cut to the bone.
“Fucking freshie!” he shrieked. “Gripper, get the fuck down
here!”
Down?
A boot hit Adorn in the upper back, throwing him forward
onto his hands and knees. The man dangling from the crane smashed down on top
of him, all his weight going directly onto Adorn’s lower back. It should have
knocked him flat, but he got a knee up and used it to roll himself to the side
first. He kicked upward with his aching foot, the blow landing right in the V
of the man’s groin. Luckily, he was close enough to humanoid standard that his
genitals were vulnerable, and he folded over in his metal harness with a howl
of pain.
Adorn felt like he’d just split the skin on the bottom of
his foot in two. Every inch of him prickled with pain, and the distraction was
too much—he didn’t catch the next blow to his ribs, or the one after that to
his head. He lashed out with his blade, but a second later someone stomped down
hard on his wrist, pinning his arm in place as someone else kicked his knife
away. He snarled, adrenaline surging once more, ready to rip the helmet off and
use his teeth if he had to.
“Wizard!”
Everyone froze. Even Adorn, riled as he was, stilled at the
pure panic in the Rover’s voice. “Wizard on the way!” the man screamed from
where he sat at the controls of the crane, already reeling the extension in.
“Get your asses moving, now!”
Wizard? Adorn looked around for any sign of what
a wizard might be, but all he saw was the occasional burst of fire and the
wavering haze from the heat, and…wait. In the distance, there was something
scintillating through the air. It looked like a sheet of silvery rain, but that
was impossible. Everyone knew it never rained on Dark.
Whatever it was, Adorn was captivated. The closer the
silvery lines got, the more they looked like tendrils, a handful of delicate
threads completely out of place against the fiery hellscape. One of the threads
ranged farther than the others, stretching forward almost like it knew what it
wanted, and what it wanted was…him.
For the first time since landing—really, for the first time
since he was ejected from his home—Adorn’s fear melted into the background.
Whoever was on the other side of that thread, they didn’t mean him harm. They
wanted to help him.
Adorn stretched out his hand toward the silver thread, which
came closer and closer. The Rovers were in a frenzy but he ignored them; it
didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except making contact. The thread crossed the
lava easily, leaving wafts of steam in its wake. Closer, so close, almost
there…
A bag came down over his head as his arms were
simultaneously wrenched behind his back and magna-tied in place, and Adorn’s
chance at freedom vanished along with his sight.
