Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens

By Jeremiah D. Schmidt

On the dystopian isle of Junction, those occupying the foundation slums of the Rat Warrens live a hard life shrouded in near-perpetual darkness.

Fen Tunk is one such unfortunate youth. He’s a scavenger and a gang runner, who might have just found his fortunes changing after he snatches a sack-full of cash from an unwary courier. But, what at first seems like his ticket out of the darkness, ends up plunging him deeper than he could have ever imagined.

As the slum around Fen teeters closer and closer towards violence and upheaval, he tries to stay one step ahead of the local gangster and his bruisers, the imperial whistlers, and other mischief gangs prowling the under-streets and access ways. But who can Fen turn to when things start to get complicated? His scrounger sister, who spends her days climbing through the Warren garbage heaps looking for bits of flotsam to sell, or his long-time gang mates who take what they want? Does he side with a charismatic merchant with his promises of wealth, or does he slip back into obscurity to stay clear of the butcher's clippers? Does he even have a choice? Only the Gutter Lady and her cards seem to hold the answers.

In the end, climbing out of the Rat Warrens requires walking a fine line with finesse; step too far in one direction, and one can find oneself falling over the precipice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeremiah D. Schmidt
• Release date: Dec 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310192074

Jeremiah D. Schmidt

Jeremiah D. Schmidt was born in Minnesota in the early 80's, raised in Maine during the 90's, and has frequented Florida when New England winters have proven tiresome. He attended the University of Maine at Orono during a time when the Black Bears hockey team was winning, and received his bachelor's degree in Anthropology back when a liberal arts degree seemed like a good idea. In the years since, he's worked as a furniture maker, a cinema projectionist, a grounds keeper, a GIS map technician, and an autobiography writer (writing autobiographies in the third person). He's always had a passion for storytelling, not verbally though (he was much to shy for that), and so handcrafted many a book in his childhood. Later, he would start to flush these stories out, after realizing they wouldn't write themselves, and that carrying drywall is a miserable job. Jeremiah's first real book, Aethosphere: Coalescence of Shadows and Light, is available for e-book purchase and has been read by perhaps a dozen adventurous spirits. His hope is to reach a dozen more.

Book preview

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Aethosphere Chronicles: Rat Warrens

By Jeremiah D Schmidt

Copyright © 2015 Jeremiah D Schmidt

Smashwords Edition

All Rights Reserved

Cover Illustration Copyright © 2015 by Jeremiah D Schmidt

Cover Design by Jeremiah D Schmidt

Map of the Pinprick Slums by Jeremiah D Schmidt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

ISBN: 9781310192074

V3

Foreword

Greetings, potential reader. I’d like to take this opportunity to briefly explain to you what you’re about to read.

As the title implies, this story is part of the Aethosphere Chronicles, which is a loose assemblage of interrelated stories written not only to entertain, but to enrich the storyline of the Aethosphere series of books. However, this shouldn’t dissuade anyone unfamiliar with the main series from giving this story a read, as it requires no prior knowledge of events or characters from Aethosphere (or of the other Chronicles for that matter). It has been crafted to stand on its own.

So please, think of this as an opportunity to vet the series if you’ve never been exposed; or as a chance to enrich the experience if you have.

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Map of the Pinprick Slums

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epliogue

Thank You

Discover

Connect

Map of the Pinprick Slum

Prologue

Fen Tunk was eight the last time a scamp lost his thumbs. The news of a man caught scamming the system burned through the darkness of the Pinprick Slum as intensely as any lightbringer’s candle, and grew to a Rat Warren-wide event, even attracting denizens as far off as Gutterway, Slag Town, and URP.

It’d all started when the local rat lord, a gangster-boss by the name of Trevor Trask, caught wind of some schlub hawking Iron notes for tokens directly with the locals, and thus completely bypassing his Bartermen’s Exchange. A practice specifically forbidden. The economics of it were totally lost on Fen, making no sense as to why anyone from the slums would trade out their tokens for notes. Not with a three-to-one rate favoring the tokens, and no market in the Pinprick for notes anyway. In light of that, working with a scamp just seemed like throwing your hard-won money away out of spite… or stupidity.

However, what did make sense was the rat lord’s ire, and it was really of no surprise when Boss Trask sent his dangermen and bruisers out in force to scour the Pinprick in search of the fool. Didn’t take them long to find him either, not with plenty of loose lips looking for a handout or two.

Course they got him… greed makes men blind to danger, Art Tunk slurred out drunkenly on the evening the news rippled through the slum. Fen’s sister Lydia had just finished asking their father why the scamp didn’t leave the Pinprick after making bank, and that was about all he had to say on the matter. From there on out Art resumed sitting bowlegged on a heap of blankets, staring into the corner of the cramped hovel, where the last of their bric-a-brac burned to embers atop a pile of bricks playing at being a hearth.

It was a few days later when Trask finally had the exposed scamp dragged out for punishment beneath the Sentinel. The whole slum had taken on a festive atmosphere by then, and though Fen’s father wouldn’t have normally bothered, he’d heard tell the Pinprick’s Skylight was free of charge for the duration, and with bench-rent running two tokens a sixth hour that was a prospect too good to pass-up.

As I came around the bend the criers done announced, ‘Lollygaggers welcomed,’ and the ratties lined up and down the Scumside rejoiced. The Old Big River Drain Line was so loud—ne’er heard it that loud—nearly brought down the shaft, Art had explained to his huddled children in a rare moment of clarity. What he hadn’t explained at the time though, was how he’d been passing along the Chimes Way, drinking away what little they’d managed to scrounge up over the months.

As Lydia told it, since losing his comfy position at Hanns Company, their father had taken less and less of an interest in the wellbeing of the family, seeming more concerned with drinking and muttering at ghosts than anything else. She’d once said some claimed it was the Miner’s Madness that ailed him; too much time spent around the atmium crystals buried deep inside the isle; but most brushed it away as an excuse for weak-willed men without the backbone for hard work. So down to the Rat Warrens they descended once the companymen gave them the boot from the workers’ tenements up on the second tier. After that, it was their mother who fought to support the family, but that could only last so long. Two, sometimes three shift workdays took its toll, until one night, before leaving for her shift at the Scullery, she’d snapped and screamed bloody-murder at Art, calling him an unmotivated lunatic. She never came home after that, and as proof positive of Art’s decline, he barely acknowledged her absence at all, and instead just charged Lydia with picking up the slack, even though she was only ten at the time.

Fen was but four himself, but he could still hear the rapid pattering of his mother’s footsteps as she fled through the pipe, taking her from their hidden nook in the Pillars to the snarl of the Pipeyards; and from there… who knows. It would prove to be Fen’s last memory of her.

After she’d gone things only got worse at home. Art’s attention vanished until the day he simply stopped breathing and they had to drag him down Skitter Row and pitch him into the Axillary Drain Line, turning him into floater-food for the finslugs and snapper eels. But until that day came about, Fen’s father’s sole occupation was with what he could find in the Warrens, and for how much he could pawn it to buy his evening draught of gutter gin. The only exception to the routine came the day the scamp was set to stand trial (and the Pinprick’s light was offered up free of charge). Though Art had been an ill-tempered and mad drunk for as long as Fen could remember, at least he’d had the decency to take Boss Trask up on his singular act of generosity—for the sake of his children—even if his motivations might have been selfish.

Art, like Fen and his sister, hadn’t seen the light of day in four years, and in order to see anything during the trial meant arriving at the Node hours beforehand. But when they’d arrived, it was to bruisers and the sunkeepers keeping an already anxious throng at bay so the rat lord’s dangermen could go about their preparations. Fen got so antsy waiting that he met the back of his father’s hand three times before the Pinprick even saw its first inclination of daybreak, and he might have gotten the boot too had Lydia not taken her younger brother’s hand and engaged him in a perpetual game of Fists for Skies. She even let Fen win on more occasions then her pride might otherwise have allowed.

When the moment finally arrived for the scamp’s judgment, the threshold to the Node was so packed with onlookers that the sunkeepers had to climb the pipework just to escape the eager stampede. The whole Chimes Way rocked beneath their thundering passage, setting the overhead chains to jangling madly, while Fen and his family rode the tidal crest of hapless poor right into the Node’s open plaza. And as soon as they could, they grabbed a spot on a bench… a real bench too. Every square centimeter of the Node’s chamber was crammed full in no time at all, transforming it into a cesspool of bodies. When room below failed, some even dared the train trestle some twelve meters overhead, where a break in the foundations made the Skylight possible.

Everywhere there were people, with but one exception, a telling circle beneath the Sentinel Tree’s pale up-reaching canopy. That’s where Fen had locked his eyes in anticipation, and that’s when he’d first felt it…real light. After having wound its way down through three hundred meters of upward urban sprawl, a fleeting trickle of sun splashed against his face. The heat and the light brought with it memories of an easier time, of when his family had a real home, and of a special place on tier two where Fen used to sneak off and talk with his only friend at the time.

See, the second tier was almost as dark as the Warrens but there was a place hidden behind the Tunk’s tenement where Fen could wiggle through some piping onto a ledge. There was a clearing punching straight up to the sky there, and every once and a while Fen’s friend, the sun, would come peeping on down. After, Fen would run back to their two room apartment and tell his mom all about it. She’d smile and nod and comment, oh really, that’s fantastic, and then give him a big hug and shoo him away. There was a lot of happiness in those memories, and standing in the Pinprick’s wash had been like being back there wrapped in his mother’s embrace.

At eight Fen knew he was too old to be crying, but tears sprang to his eyes almost instantly anyway, and from there on out he had to watch the proceedings through blurry vision. He felt a little better about it when he saw his sister crying too, and at that time she was twelve.

What they watched together