Luska

By Will Robinson

The caretakers of humanity, the Idrix, are destroyed by an unknown force, breaking down the order that had dominated the galaxy for nearly a millennium.
Eidi is a unique, precognitive student, who lives on the divided planet of Luska and knows that their future is full of death and destruction, but can she stop it?
Sreiwa is a fanatical spy and assassin who helped enable an invasion of her own planet and becomes a pawn in the deadly intrigue of a Byzantine and brutal culture.
Sellen is an Idrix soldier who escaped the destruction of his fleet only to find himself in a jungle hellscape where his only salvation is in the form of a sworn enemy.
Cigva is an enigmatic AI who joins Eidi to struggle against mind-controlling horrors, nightmare simians, deadly parasites, and a surprising, tyrannical foe from her home planet of Luska.
But the real danger lies in the showdown that is taking place between a long-dormant alien race called the Spearfinger, and the anti-alien, god-like Eth, where the ramifications of their confrontation could decide the future of the galaxy and the direction of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Will Robinson
• Release date: Dec 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370241729

Will Robinson

When not drowning in coffee and writing his 500th best selling query letter, Will likes to play frisbee with his border collie, hike, fish, and ulcerate. He also enjoys trying to remember how to art and reads a lot of sci-fi, Amazon author bios, literary fiction, historical fiction, anthropology, science, history, Ikea instructions, and cereal boxes. Supposedly, one of his ancestors saw a king once, but another ancestor said that was BS.

Book preview

Chapter 1:

The Beetle

Sreiwa

I enter Niislek Jhot under the cover of darkness. The ancient Tchaigan capital of wood and basalt is now showing its decrepitude as grenades splinter dry-rotted timbers and projectiles shatter weathered stucco facades.

They would not be the only facades shattered on this day.

I feel like the tiny beetles that voraciously eat the flowers on the sour kiraz tree. The beetles that my sadistic boy cousins would capture, pluck the legs from, and then throw up into the air to fly away on a flight that would never end.

The power is out in the city, and the world is the deepest, darkest indigo without the little sun to burnish the night. The strong south wind has blown away the particulates in the stratosphere from city-smashing kinetic weapons, if only momentarily, and the galaxy makes an arc of a billion blazing suns overhead from quadrillions of kilometers away.

The din of projectiles deafens my ears and the rumble of explosions rattles my bones. The blasts are accompanied by the screams of the dying and the slapping of feet running toward or away from danger, but I keep to the shadowed recesses of the convulsing city.

Deadly confusion reigns. What was supposed to be a swift war against our sworn enemies, the Gathaban-run Eastern Alliance, is now a fiasco. The Vankarem, our former slaves, have risen in a cunning ambush against their distracted masters. Tchaiga is caught in a box, a box that is quickly turning into a casket.

I slink down thoroughfares that for most of my life have been the entirety of my known world. I peer into the abandoned wood and stone of illegal bajshars, the traditional martial training centers, looking for anyone I know yet see nothing but corpses and rats. On the sacred rise in the distance, I see the Donagi’s palace giving off a glow of flames licking the thousand-year-old timber and tiles of its tiered roof.

Where is our sovereign, Donagi Radien?

I make my way methodically to my aunt’s villa in the old district. Seeing her again is the only thing that matters to me now. I know she has not been here for years, yet I hope there are clues.

Soon I reach the portico of my childhood home, the theater for the play that was my youth. A play that was sometimes comedic but ultimately tragic.

The door is un-warded, and I walk in. My aunt has not lived here since the pre-uplift era, and the villa sat unoccupied for many years. I have no knowledge of who lives here now, if they still live. Whoever are the denizens of this manor now, they were either leaving or moving in before the fighting started. There are chests, trunks, and kists in all manner of sizes and in different states of packing or unpacking; it is difficult to tell which.

I walk into one of the larger rooms where I remember the whole family gathering during the holidays. As I ponder whose home this may be now, I roam around like a nomad. Sights and smells transport me back to my youth: pickled vegetables and meats, aromatic herbs, gall inks, kusahti, and something else—death. Those smells don’t bring comfort, for my youth was not a simpler time; it was not something I look back on with swooning nostalgia like most fools—it was as complex as the innards of a sincit and just as fraught with peril as the present.

I continue wandering until I reach the kitchen where I notice two people slumped over in the nook where my aunt and I would eat laibi, the first meal of the day. The something else smells are the gasses of rotting flesh. I glance briefly at the corpses, but they are bloated beyond recognition. I decide against ghoulishly knocking the bodies over to see if I can discern their identities by staring at their swollen faces; I just don’t care enough. And although famished, I leave their food stores untouched for the moment, but I will soon need to eat if I am to keep my senses sharp. I am still not fully recovered from my poisoning and journey back from the god Tangun’s embrace.

He shot me, the bastard! The poisoned dart affronted my rib. I had cultivated that boy and made him into a man. Any demand that passed my lips, he would comply. And now this. I suppose I should be proud of my student for surpassing my expectations.

My aunt is not here, that much I know. But the dwelling contains other relics from my past that can be of use.

I open the wooden sliding door to the garden and stare at the jalavu tree, more majestic than I remember, as memories flood back unbidden.

One day in the garden, I tore my new kuvta climbing the jalavu tree while I boarded with my father’s sister. I knew she would be angry—it was muhan silk and expensive.

It was not something that my mother could easily afford, and I shouldn’t have been climbing trees in it. She had sent me to stay with my aunt to finish me for Tchaigan society, for my mother was not of Tchaiga. My father’s revenues had been cut back as punishment for marrying outside of his social caste and culture, and our fortunes had never recovered.

You are no better than a slave, just like your mother, my aunt said to me when she saw the tear.

She liked to belittle me by saying that I had the eyes of a ghost, and I could never belong to Tchaiga. My eyes sometimes enraged her to no end, for they reminded her that I was not her daughter.

You should be in a hole in the northern mountains with the rest of your degenerate kin! Here you are living a lie, a deceit that fools no one. All they have to do is look at your hideous face.

Her rage came out in deeply wounding ridicule and the withholding of her affection. I adulated my aunt, but her emotions were as changeable as the northern sagara, calm and gentle one moment and a violent storm the next. Perversely, I wanted to be just like her: elegant and refined but also quick with a sharp tongue when needed, and above all, unpredictable. However, I was frequently reminded that I was not one of them. My aunt would give me hugs and kisses one day and the switch and insults the next. The switch I could handle, but not her tongue.

Yet, she did not have an easy life herself. Her husband, my uncle Naran, beat her, on one occasion so badly she cried to my father, Henda, for revenge.

He challenged Naran to combat, but my grandmother, put an end to it and chastised Aunt Hele for being weak and not giving Naran any sons or even a daughter.

Once a year the whole family would gather at Grandmother’s for the Feast of the Vallutama, a holiday to celebrate our final victory over the Eskihalk, the ancient people who lived south of the Babo River. This was the battle in which Mynlo was killed, his throat and body pierced by spears of the elite Eskihalk tiger hunters when he sallied too far into the scrum of warriors. His corpse was found and hidden by his lifeguards until the battle was won.

During the dinner, my grandmother, whom we called the Spider, would be brought up from her crypt-like room of dusty relics from which she resided to spew venom at perceived infractions. But in later years dementia made her more tolerable.

My Vankarem mother once told me that her people also celebrated a victory over Tchaiga. This surprised me. I had never heard of Tchaiga losing anything.

She told me that in the northern mountain passes the Vankarem spears and bows cut down the Tchaigan shinjiich like corn at harvest time, allowing the Vankarem to not be erased like the Eskihalk, whom were now an aside in the history of their conquerors. She also said that if I asked anyone in Tchaiga about the battle of Henetoo, they would feign ignorance. Tchaigans had selective memories.

When the Eighter invasion finally came, it was as absurd as a mite wrestling a man. Imagine seeing a voidship drop out of the sky for the first time when our civilization had animal shit in its streets, thought sickness was brought on by Jadujj possession, and the fleas in our beds outnumbered the ones on our dogs. We thought that the ruin, the Hukatustu, had come. Their ships even favored the falling leaves from the season of Naimar, a time associated with death and storms.

This was the main force. Only later in life did I find out that they had been here for months, their silver-tongued spymasters making hollow promises to our leaders and preparing the ground for invasion. Death, destruction, and enslavement followed. The Eighter’s appetites were too voracious, their morality too lacking, and their deadly fulgu-toigs too accurate. And the weak resistance that was put up was an un-diverting joke. Our leaders had sold our souls.

Have we sold our souls again?

I gaze into the night sky covered in the bright fires of the galaxy that is the brilliant backdrop to the jalavu tree.

If we did, I am an accomplice.

The zandan floor panels creak.

Someone has entered the villa. I go through possible scenarios of how I would react to the threat in case my muscle memory fails me because of my poisoning. I now wish that I had eaten.

A voice with the cadence of an older man with a barely discernible accent breaks the silence. I am no danger to you.

I remain in the shadows, feeling a certain relief that I have not yet uncovered my hidden cache of supplies that I buried in the garden years ago. However, it is probably no matter; this man will soon be at the end of my knife.

The fool speaks again, I come to you with an offer, for I know who you are.

Who am I?

You are the daughter of Jaeo Henda Nikufiu.

"Show yourself, and I shall determine who you are," I say, masking my surprise.

"I see that I have caught you at a disadvantage, so I shall tell you, but I shall tell you from where I stand, for I also appreciate your reputation as a shinjiich, and I wish to keep my guts in my belly.

I am an agent of Mnos and a functionary of Ion zal Satrulea, Suveran of Mnos, Hammer of the Idrix, Imperat of the Tertat systems, and now benevolent ruler of Luska. You, Sreiwa Nikufiu, are his subject and have been honored to be chosen as the representative of Luska.

He knows much about me, too much.

‘Hammer of the Idrix.’ Presumptuous, don’t you think? I say, mostly trying to delay and digest what he just said.

The Idrix are no more, and Mnos is free from its imprisonment; all are indisputable facts, he says, betraying a slightly irked inflection to his voice.

I feel loud booms in the sky. Not bombs this time but a noise I remember from my youth, and the memory causes an involuntary shudder. I look up in the open sky of the courtyard and see the bright fires of the night firmament falling, growing. It is true! We have sold our souls once again!

You see, we are here, he speaks, coming out of the shadows and facing me.

I know him. You were Woya the servant. The dead are the Nimogens.

I had visited them once in Ree with their son. The father knew who I was. I even suspected that he was the one who assigned me to Ludjo. Ludjo knew his father despised him, but not how much.

"Yes, I was. Jaeo Sei Nimogen was to be the reprezentat, but his wife was playing a long game, just as I was, misdirecting me with that slave. She saw her death.

And now you are here. I have promised a reprezentat, the choice that I have cultivated for years is dead, so you, a member of the Sukui, must do.

Now I see him in the light, and he appears as white as new snow, but his lips are crimson with his lifeblood.

"Prepare yourself to be taken to the conducator. If you impress him, you may rise high, daami Nikufiu. If not...well, I think that you will be sufficient. What is left for you here? The donagi fled with most of the Sukui. Oh, we know where they are—on Silla, the largest moon of the gas giant Bai-Ulgan. Consider yourself fortunate; it is a poor existence. They do not appear to want to collaborate with us this time except to make sure we destroy the Gathaban. No, they did not tell you anything, did they? Perhaps they are planning something else. No matter, they are crumbs to be swept up later."

The former Woya looks to be fading even as he sprays more and more verbiage mixed with red. Blood trickles down his nose and his mouth, which he wipes off occasionally with his embossed wool, deil sleeve. I take leave of him, but it appears not to register in his lost gaze, and he continues speaking as if he does not notice he is dying.

The house shakes with a blast from an unknown combatant, but neither of us react.

I go to the bathing room and clean the road off myself with a cloth. I remove my brown contacts and stare at my Vankarem mother’s curse, my grey eyes, while I wonder whether my former lover is alive. If he is, he does not know that his parents sit rotting face down in their uneaten breakfast. I have fulfilled my oath to him, but I do not know how to treat him in my mind. My thoughts, my life even, are an un-curated collection of images and failures.

When I finish, the former Woya is as dead as the couple, collapsed against a wall in a pool of his own liquefied bowels right under the wood-carved heraldry of the seto resplendent.

A bit less resplendent now.

I eat some pickled fish and dig up my supplies. I dress in my battle wraps, tie the scabbard of my ciekka blade to my waist, pull my hair back with a weaponized hair clip, and sit.

I am brought to a storm ship on the eastern outskirts of the city by two soldiers of Mnos. For the first time I glimpse their legendary eyes of impenetrable black, the product of some founder effect or bottleneck ages ago. They were informed that I was to be the reprezentat and almost treat me with respect while their blood-soaked sfarzicani sniffs me with disinterest.

En route, I see Gathaban attack ships die quick, glorious deaths overhead, and a group of Vankarem Pascha-tuul vaporize before my eyes, but I respect their valor.

The hate has gone out of me like steam from a venting geyser. But I feel that it could be replaced; it is an old friend that I could invite back.

As I am forced to kneel before the conducator, he asks me my name, and I tell him, Inra Okara, as my mother used to call me in Vankarem: White Eyes.

Seconds later his head explodes as it is hit with proximity ammunition fired from the top of a building, and I am peppered with fragments of exploding road stones and bone shards. I stand and wipe the dust and gore off my face and smirk a little at the stupid, overconfident, dead conducator, whose body is covered in machinas-teq armor except for his fool head.

I squint at the building where the flanking fire came from. I have a silly thought that I see someone familiar, with his ridiculous mustache and crooked nose, up there in the ship’s searchlights. But quickly the vessel’s boilers reduce the roof to ash as more Gathaban attack ships swarm, and I am rushed up into the storm ship.

The legless beetle has found a place to land after all.

Chapter 2:

Present Uncertain

Eidi- Four days earlier.

A beam of starlight finds me through the gap in the curtain. I turn and twist in the glimmer of light as if it is a thousand burning suns branding my skin as my curse works its motions upon my brain and body. In my mind’s eye, I first glimpse a beast the baiku holy men of old spoke of——the Jadujj, the Spearfinger with its equine, ossified head, spiky tresses, and thrusting projections——but in an instant, it vanishes as the galaxy, is before me, gifting my sight a panorama of converging events, some false, some true. I envision my true self in the dun-colored future, but my shell of a body exists in the past, going through the motions of a life I have already seen. My mind’s eye gazes upon death in water crashing up to a door of bones. There is a red horizon negated by a world-shattering explosion. Sleek voidships are blazoned with fire, while below, a snowy mountain is dwarfed by a tower as tall as space as armies march to victory and defeat. A flicker shows through of a nightmare in flight on leathery wings, a blade in the shadows, the feeling of rising up, up to the prize, a champion massacring a pernicious foe, a resplendent woman in a church of blood, a wall of fire ending a life. Then an intense sense of pain-ending joy as I am spun into another being. Suddenly I feel myself afire; my head pounding with a pain near intolerable, as I wake, my body burning, my bed soaked with perspiration and saliva. I slip the waiting IV needle inside my vein and run fluid into my parched form as I stumble to the tub, pulling along the hovering IV. There I step into the piercing cold and lay supine in the ice bath until I am shivering uncontrollably.

The danger has passed, but my world is racing toward events that could be catastrophic to everyone I care for, and it is all happening soon—very soon.

Chapter 3:

Propaganda

Eidi

I rest my left cheek against the window of the University Vero dining hall, the morning condensation long burned away. Luska’s familiar sun blinds me, and I feel as though I will wilt in its warmth, but my hope is that it will cauterize my wounded brain.

Birds flit about, just outside the window. They are free to fly anywhere they care——maybe to the snows of the Vankarem to the north or to the south to pick a bug off the supposedly extinct tigers. Or maybe east, over the sea, to the city-state of Medii on the Gathaban continent and peer into the biology classes at University Medii-where I would like to be. But they are here with me, acting strangely, flying near my face as if they want to whisper something in my ear. Soon they disappear into the glare. My trance broken, I look at my soup and stir, making a spiral shape, like the galaxy, our galaxy, but then it untwines as a vegetable emerges on the surface of the now nebulous stew. The smell of the fish stock starts to make me sick, and my next urge is to crawl under the dark table and live out my days without a worry in the world, shaded and grabbing sustenance from unsuspecting students. They would leave this feral table-thing unmolested, and I would only have to growl at the occasional professor or maintenance machina before they too learned to respect my little cave. But then I begin to feel anxious as my body reminds me that I am claustrophobic.

Seidis, I am doomed, there is no escape.

Can’t anyone help me?

My father had tried. He set me up with a Gathaban cognative analyst, yet, he couldn’t help to stave off my episode. However, I recall that the analyst did scrape out something from my afflicted brain’s strata:

Hr. Vilasalya: What is your relationship with your mother?

I look at him dubiously. My mother? My mother? How is my mother relevant to why I am here? These dreams are about calamity, megamurders, and galaxy-wide conflagration, not about how I hate my mother——not that I hate my mother.

He raises his eyebrows at my comment but then he lights up a pipe of tskahat, which is most certainly against the air code. The flame highlights the prominent regions of his face while he gazes at me intensely in the dimly lit room.

I didn’t say that you hated your mother. These dreams could be metaphors for what is happening in your family. We think in metaphors——we humans.

We humans?

I cock my head forward, eyes wide and almost shout, I’m an adult; if my mother had an issue with me or my love life or my choice of clothing, I could just not answer my wavescreen, move to the country, or ward the door. But I don’t even have to——no, I haven’t seen my mother in five years, so she isn’t causing me any problems in the least. I’m here because I am scared out of my Seidis-damned mind! I think that I am going to either die during my next vision of a cardiac event or I am going to perish along with everyone else when the planet or galaxy, kalax, alethau, or whatever you Gathaban call it, rips apart,

He ignores most of my word salad and gets to the crux, So, you really think that the galaxy is in danger? That seems extreme.

Why couldn’t there be a happy medium for people who study mental processes? This Gathaban analyst thinks I’m just crazy, but if I had said this to a Tchaigan analyst, they would haul me of to some baiku priest and turn me into a holy shrine to be crapped on by birds.

"Didn’t you hear me? Everything is extreme to me——I am losing it. I see the future. I see the future, and the future is a paralyzing horror!

Events I view in my dreams come true, every keppin’ thing! Well, mostly. And you, you in your little insular bubble here are probably going to die too!

He doesn’t enjoy me spouting about his demise, and as he ushers me out of his office of minimalist décor, I have a thought.

You know, my mother really is the cause of a lot of my problems.

I might come back to him sometime.

My eye catches—or is it my mind? Newla strolling over through the jawing diners, holding a book and what, for her, passes as food.

I know that book——I read it days ago, but I lost my copy. No——I threw it out the window. Maybe it hit someone and she has it as evidence for my arrest and they will lock me away for good, which doesn’t sound so bad.

Listen to this, she says, flopping down across from me, opening the ludicrous volume to a marked page as I peel my face off the window. Immediately, I know exactly which passage she is going to read and I get excited; this is just the distraction I need.

Sunmi gazed out over the land and found it pleasing. She would not step into the fire, but assume the ways of the small people. Her prince was perished in war, but her life would go on undiminished, celebrating the small joys of toil and communion with her people.

I rehearse my feigned, well, not exactly feigned, outrage in my mind for a moment, and then almost yell, What the heck? Why? What are they trying to accomplish with this?

I pause for effect, but before Newla can get a word in, I keep going, Sunmi is supposed to step into the bonfire and burn to a crisp after she hears that Mynlo is killed in battle. When my brother burned the toast, he would say, ‘It’s Sunmi for breakfast again!’——but now you are supposed to imagine that the noble Sunmi just married a pig farmer and squeezed out little farm brats while smiling?

It is a better message to women than burning alive, Newla replies, blank-faced, but I see a hidden smile. She enjoys this pantomime of ours; it livens up her day. Tomorrow I suspect she will bring me something equally outrageous.

I pause again, but this time not for drama. My head is killing me as I down a glass of water. Last night I felt like I was burning alive.

This appeals to no one. Amateurs are running the propaganda department. It will only further infuriate Tchaigans, I gripe, actually angry, my head hurting more. But I keep going. You and I could write better bunk than this. The original version is terrible enough with its message——ladies, if your man dies, well that’s it, go jump into a bonfire. But that was written like a thousand years ago, yet now the message is: if your man dies, become a farmer’s wife? That is dumb on so many levels. Why does she need to be someone’s wife, anyway? In some ways, the Gathaban are just as backward as us.

So?

So, what?

So, what would your version be? Also, there’s nothing wrong with farming.

Who cares about farming! I’ll tell you what my version would be! I say too loud and my emphatic gesture causes my hand to splash the cold soup, mostly in the face of a cringing Newla, but I continue as if nothing happened. Sunmi writes a vid-play about her life as a princess and her struggle to love again after her prince gets pricked in the neck with a spear and up and dies. The Gathaban would eat that up and buy everything she cranks out, making her rich.

She’s already rich, she’s a helveetin princess! Also, I think you are confusing time periods. I don’t think the Gathaban were consuming much media when she was around.

True, well, maybe the proto-Gathaban and scrolls and stuff, whatever, but at least she’d now have a career outside of the palace, away from all that lay-about court intrigue and rich desserts.

Newla shrugs as if to say she’d love to lay about the court, but I know she’d pass on the desserts, for she must always deny herself something.

I turn my head again toward the sun in the window, tightly close my eyes and commune with its heat. I relax a little as we sit amidst a sea of students going about their frivolous lives at the University, chatting about this rather uncommon analog book, printed by the Gathaban dominated Eastern Alliance. The book is part of the propaganda that they are pushing on Tchaigans to soften us toward our benevolent overlords.

You know, Tchaiga is pushing its own disinformation, Newla says, looking around as if she is worried someone will overhear her.

Hmm, oh yeah I heard.

I’m now too tired to play along. But I know that recently, some lost, Tchaigan-language epic poetry surfaced, dictated to a scribe from the old capital, Niislek Jhot, by two mysterious hermits, Ommot and Skaga from the island of Nona. A meager bit of the poetry is decent, but most of it is pedestrian at best and obviously, a fraud, created to give more credence to the origin myth of the Badarchin, the wanderers who supposedly settled Tchaiga.

I half-close my heavy eyes.

What do you think of that?

When no answer is forthcoming, she yells, Eidi are you asleep? Wake up! Am I that boring?

I snap awake.

I am only half asleep, so you’re only half boring, but to answer your question, it took two mystical old fart hermits and a scribe to write this skata. I could have written better poetry in a coma.

Newla puts her face up to mine and squints—— Eidi, you look like death. Did you have one of your spells?

Thanks, I say, cracking a sardonic smile. Yeah, but I’m still alive and kicking, I just feel like Rhuotta’s wife warmed over and I’m weak as a kitten.

Did Rhuotta have a wife? He would make a terrible husband.

Yes, death gods make poor spouses.

Sometimes my clever turns of phrases are wasted on Newla, but that is a part of her charm. Also, she doesn’t know how bad I have my spells, and I don’t want to elaborate. Some people have a small one occasionally. They just kick their feet back and watch the vid-plays on the wavescreen until it passes and take a biotic the next day. I, on the other hand, need much more replenishment and time to recover. Newla can tell that I don’t want to talk about my burden, and she goes back to our former topic of conversation.

Sorry, but poorly doctored origin myths are a lot better than war, Newla says as she starts to put the book back into her pack.

She always says sorry about everything, probably because her dad is a controlling despot, but I’ve mostly given up trying to make her own everything she says without apology.

True, but I can still complain about it. And hey——can I have that book? You said they are just giving them away.

She hands it over and turns to leave the dining hall while saying, Sorry, but what good has our culture ever done us? Not twenty years ago we were pretty much a slave society, for Seidis’ sake. And we’re still probably the most backward planet in the galaxy, which I am reminded of every time I visit my family outside of Vero.

I knew she was just pretending to like farming, I think as I watch Newla walk away to the washroom.

During our next class I keep dozing off. My head nods forward and I wake with a start or Newla slaps me in the back of the head if I nod too far.

This is our Idrix language class, and it is usually the only class that I enjoy. The language is so different from Tchaigan in that its specificity and vocabulary is four times as large. Tchaigan is less specific and uses more context to clue you in on the minutiae. Today the professor is explaining that Idrix, a word that maybe meant the church, or something similar, was derived partially from an extinct language so that no planet could claim ownership, which sounds like another ridiculous origin myth.

At least, that’s the part of the lecture I remember before waking up in a puddle of drool, Newla having given up on me.

I walk back to my apartment admiring the clean lines of the well-lit hallway in between waves of nausea, dodging students with the new heads-up displays that spray a perpetual, invisible mist in front of their faces, where text and images are projected. I hold my breath when I pass them—— I am sure that the mist is a carcinogen, while at the same time habitually checking my, now outdated, wavescreen for Newla’s chatty face, anyone else on the local net or even the spectral signals that we receive from humanity across the void.

Our discussion on Sunmi and Mynlo causes me to muse about how the people living in the city-states are different from their counterparts in other areas of Tchaiga. Our faith in gods has been replaced by faith in complex and invisible systems that run our world, feed us news and gossip, and distract from, yet sometimes fuel, our existential anxieties. But some in Vero do, if half-heartedly, believe in the Idrix religious import, the Eth, but it has been bleeding congregants since the Idrix retreated and the war between the Gathaban and Tchaigans ended seven years ago.

The only thing I worship is my precious wavescreen, I think as I give it a hug, almost drop it, and laugh through my headache at my ridiculousness, then look around to see if anyone saw me being a punchy weirdo.

That night, Newla and I eat dinner with my father, and thankfully, his lady-friend, Hele, is conspicuously absent, or she might have made her infamous stew. It was a kind of garlicy dishwater. Garlic, I like——dishwater, not so much.

We bring him some takeout from a Gathaban restaurant. I love how spicy their food is, but that night it gives my father the hiccups, annoying me to no end, which he eventually cures with several glasses of water.

We also watch a new vid-play. It is a trashy romance with ludicrous action sequences set against every melodrama’s favorite subject, the invasion of the Eighters.

During the ubiquitous part of the vid that has the Eighters marching out of their storm ships on the eighth day of the eighth month wearing armored skirts, carrying lightning staffs and donning masks of their beast gods, Father mostly guesses what the leader will say when he marches out of his ship.

This planet is ours! He exclaims, seconds before the leader chews the scenery.

Luska is ours!

"You’re wrong," I say flatly.

Seidis, but he gets on my nerves, especially since he got that nurse girlfriend last year. I am thankful she isn’t here or I would really be spewing some spite.

He was only slightly wrong, Newla says, sticking up for him. He has become almost a surrogate father to her since her parents disappeared. She defends him against my antagonism, which, deep down, I am glad about.

It’s not like it’s hard to guess, I say.

My comment sparks a moment of self-awareness of what an ass I am being, which summons a feeling of self-loathing and more eating.

The vid predictably ends with the Idrix intervention and uplifting of Luska, the slaves are freed, the Eighters are imprisoned on their planet, and the romantic leads are reunited. The heroine was a slave for an elite family on Mnos, and the man a gallant resistance fighter on Luska; no new ground is broken with that old trope.

That night I don’t sleep well. I am still recovering from my spell and I have a terrible sense of foreboding that I cannot shake, the words burning and churning keep going through my mind. I remember a beam of star-light shone through the curtain and onto my face like a brand. I recall water washing through a city and crashing against a gigantic door of bones and armies and monsters and murder. Damn, this really, really sucks.

Why didn’t I have visions of answers to tests or how to get rid of my father’s bitchy girlfriend and not this non-specific, kishoo-skata mish-mash?

When I do finally sleep, I am abruptly awakened to find my wavescreen wall powered on; the room is lit up in bright yellow and the sound of static, the sputtering background radiation of the birth of the universe fills my ears. A spiral-shape, again is a theme, as yellow dots multiply and cover the whole of the ersatz galaxy.

A representation of the Eth?

I am not a believer like my brother, but some think they conquered the galaxy with self-replicating machinas that overwhelmed and eradicated alien life while seeding feeder worlds with humanity and our homeworld’s flora and fauna.

I’m not sure what to think; it seems too tidy, yet may hold a kernel of truth.

Suddenly, the wall becomes attuned to a vidcast that I had not watched since I was a child. It is the vid-drama, Mensura Heat, a Gathaban-made program about two agents of the Mensura, an Idrix, intra- galactic crime task force. It was a little over my head at the time, but my older brother, Sellen, loved it and so did Vero, if not the rest of Tchaiga. The two agents were named Jaga and Hish.

The Idrix have two home planets: one, of military and fanatical Eth devotion, called Sator, and the other, of science and machinas-teq, called Inion. Jaga was from Inion and Hish was from Sator. Consequently, Hish always wanted to throw bombs and Jaga wanted him to think about it.

I identified with the Jaga character and Sellen with Hish. But tonight, the program has me as Hish and Sellen as Jaga. I’m blowing away the bad guys and Sellen is imploring me to quit killing everyone so that he can interrogate them and find out who’s behind it all. Eventually, we bust down a door in a room at the top of the building and find——my father’s girlfriend Hele?

Well I do hate her.

The screen goes blank, my bed shakes. My eyes dart around the room, but there is no one else in my sparse apartment, my roommate left two weeks past. I think her family is part of the secret resistance to the Eastern Alliance and they forced her to return home to Adaat, a city to the west, next to a giant blue lake. She dragged her feet as long as she could, her father sending her increasingly threatening messages to her wavescreen until she couldn’t make any more excuses and left—very unhappy.

This is a small quake.

There was an earthquake during my vision. But Tchaiga is a seismically active land mass, tremors are not rare, there’s even a range of volcanoes in the west that occasionally remind us that they exist——by exploding.

I stay up to see if there is another one. Yet soon my mind wanders and I begin thinking about Luska and our future and my conversation with Newla in the dining hall. I do agree with Newla, to a point. We are unsophisticated compared to the the Idrix and even the Gathaban across the sea. We have become dependent on the Idrix but only because the Eighters ruined our society by forcing the Munbans, the leading gentry, into becoming their slave brokers, turning our home-grown pathologies up to the utmost level.

Thankfully, the Idrix did away with that. Now the wealthy in Tchaiga have poorly paid servants.

The era of the Mnosene occupation seems as distant as the little sun after growing up in the egalitarian and free world of Vero. Even the patriarchic culture of my own people of Tchaiga, well, my father’s people, is foreign to me. Maybe that’s why I defend them, because I don’t have to live there, and they lost the war.

But then my mind drifts again and I think about my mother. My father called her a manic hummingbird, petite and flitting about to different projects. I am having trouble forming a picture of her in my mind. It has been five years since she left, but it feels like an eternity. The analyst was right to bring her up for I blame everything on her. I blame her for leaving me with my emotionally distant father, encouraging my brother to join the Idrix military, sleeping around and acting like everything she did was for the good of the galaxy. If I ever see her again I would scream at her five years’ worth of anger and disappointment.

And I don’t even remember our goodbye. I know my brother didn’t say goodbye, but he was a macho jerk and that was to be expected.

Well, I’m sure he at least nodded, or gave me a wink like an old, poorly dubbed, off-world vid-drama. I’ll be seeing you toots.

He used to make me paper animals; he knew I liked animals.

I think he only made them once; memory is such an unreliable mechanism. Yet I do remember he got mad at me and burned all of them. All but one, the tiger; he knew it was my favorite.

No. I rescued it out of the fire myself.

I know my mother said goodbye, I have just buried it in my mind along with everything else that hurts, even if it hurts more to think she didn’t say goodbye.

Humans are ridiculous. At least this one is.

I don’t feel another tremor, and I fall back to sleep, not noticing the sirens that are going off all around the city.

Chapter 4:

Hov

Eidi

I wake to the news that the ocean just swallowed the city of Hov.

As I watch a recording of a tsunami of epic proportions drowning Hov, a traditional town and capital of the new northern province of Vankarem, grief pours over me for the thousands of people that I know have just been washed out to sea.

I saw the wave in my waking dream, but I never know anything more than a few pictures. It’s just like a series of images that have no logical connection. But there was a theme of sorts lately: calamity, destruction, and death.

I turn away from the viewer and look at my father. I visit his office when I want to talk to him without his girlfriend around. He uses me as a sounding board for ideas and even shares sensitive Eastern Alliance information with me. The fact that I have his trust and he values my opinion on important matters is a source of pride. I never want to lose his trust, yet I still treat him poorly. It is something that I need to rectify.

He is pacing around his window-lined office that overlooks a green park and beyond that the azure ocean with the black dots of fishing skiffs scattered to the horizon. It is usually bright, but today the sky is dark red and grim, casting a shadow over everything.

An asteroid hit in the ocean, causing a tsunami, and now there are earthquakes——aftershocks, he says while pinching his nasal-ridge. An aftershock had just shaken Vero as I entered his office. It was disconcerting to say the least.

Was it the Eighters? Did they cause the asteroid?

He looks at me, furrowing his dark brow— I don’t know, but as to why it wasn’t picked up by our orbiting visios and defense stations is very puzzling, actually maybe sinister, for the asteroid could have been obscured by some machinas-teq or sabotage. So, they are certainly a suspect.

I stand up, almost shouting, I am damn sure that they were behind it, the bastards. They invaded and tried to enslave us before and now the Idrix are gone. It would make perfect sense that they would instigate something to wipe us off the planet. Then they could take our resources at will. I mean, it’s been nine years since the Idrix left, which is plenty of time for the Eighters to get here by now.

Well, they are supposedly imprisoned on their planet. Father says as he paces around the room with his arms crossed and ignoring my vulgar language. But they are still a likely suspect. The council’s official position it that it was a natural disaster. They don’t want to cause panic, even if it wastes preparation time if they are wrong.

He sits down in the chair beside me and turns off the wavescreen. His countenance is usually a serene mask, but now I can see frustration spilling from the fringes.

The people of Mnos had once been barely spacefaring, but then the Idrix came and uplifted their civilization. And as soon as they found out about our existence, only 9c away from their system, they launched an invasion of our planet using stolen Idrix intrirsus drive-teq. Five years later, the Idrix