The New Order

By Paul Baluk

Kos, wishing to atone for the sins of the past, plans to put his great power in the hands of the people. He and unlikely ally Liss Carec sweep across the worlds spreading the truth of the old order and the promise of a new one.

Treia, unsure if her brother is alive or dead after being taken by a monk, struggles to make sense of her rapidly changing world. Yathis Behren, mourning the loss of his best friend, bemoans the rut his life has become—but plans to find a way out.

Shipbuilding magnate Reega Tarn, forced to make undesirable alliances and profound sacrifices, fights to keep her company alive. Meanwhile her assistant, Samit, worries for her family as they may not live to see the dawn of the new order…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365848179

Book preview

The New Order

The New Order

Copyright

First Edition

Copyright © 2017 Paul Baluk

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-365-84817-9

Cover art by Jeff Wu

ACOLYTE

Ternos Liss Carec stands alone in a small, dim-lit compartment. There is room enough for a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, an easel. She puts finishing touches on a painting of a desert at morning, the sharp dunes masked by a cloud of hazy vermillion and blurred ochre. Liss steps back to appraise the piece, comfortable in black utility pants and tank top. Her curly, golden brown hair falls loose past her shoulders.

It has been almost a year since she set foot on her home planet, Ternos, but she knows this image of a sand-choked sunrise is just right. She will be able to compare in less than an hour. Her ship, the Acolyte, is about to complete its four-day cruise to the desert planet from the neighboring farm world, Soln.

And then… mission complete, she thinks. After this, she can go to Nuor and put the last year’s events behind her. Even traveling alone for weeks hasn’t given her time to unwind. Her ship’s once-secret technology has become the cornerstone of a new order for the worlds, and she killed the man who gave it to her—the powerful merchant monk Ven Ilos, her uncle and only family member—to save a man she barely knew.

Images of that fight flash through her mind, clear as if she is there again. She feels the knife in her hand, the flick of her wrist as she throws it into the back of his neck. That same knife hangs in a harness in the wardrobe behind her.

The man she saved was Ven Kos, now the last merchant monk of his order. Unlike her uncle, he could temper his near limitless power with compassion, with goodwill, with forgiveness. He saw the Acolyte’s technology as a way to free the worlds from the trade empire’s grasp. Kos spared her even after she put a knife in his back. That knife also hangs in the wardrobe.

Liss shakes her head. She needs to stop thinking about the past. She made her decision in a split second and has to accept that it was the right choice.

Was it the right choice?

An alert chimes throughout the ship: she will arrive at Ternos in a few minutes. Liss ties back her hair and exits the compartment into a white hallway ten meters long. She walks to the ladder at the end, climbs up to the next floor and can feel gravity’s pull grow weaker. Another white hallway, this one twice as long, stretches before her. She takes off at a jog, her strides growing longer, and at the halfway point she launches herself down the rest of the low-G corridor. She grabs hold at the end, opens the cockpit door, and swings in.

A bank of displays flickers on as she straps herself into the comfortable seat. The displays show Ternos’s rapidly-approaching night side, the planet’s asteroid ring glowing red. She keys a command into the computer to confirm she will drop into the suborbital shipping lanes. This is how she arrived at the other six worlds: drawing attention by surprising both the nearby freighters and space traffic control with her inexplicable emergence from deadspace.

Ternos draws closer and the red sun flashes out over the horizon. She nears the asteroid ring, watching the computer as her projected orbit tightens. Just a few more seconds…

Liss pushes the ‘execute’ key on the console. The interplanetary drive, a combination of gravity-warping and thrust-vectoring technology, thrums in the cargo bay beneath her and the Acolyte comes to a relative halt as its speed is cut a hundredfold. She barely feels the pull of inertia as the drive prevents the ship from flying apart, but she still checks the readouts to be sure everything is intact. Hull integrity: check. Main drive function: check. Thrusters: check. Sensors—

"Proximity alert!" a computerized male voice exclaims. Liss barely has time to take control and duck the Acolyte around a towering shard of debris. A klaxon sounds as particles ping off the hull. She activates near-body trajectory analysis and notices the analysis is taking much longer than usual—there must be thousands of significant bodies nearby. Liss watches the displays surrounding her, scanning for more oncoming obstacles. A monastery’s white hull crests the edge of Ternos. She recognizes the fifteen-kilometer long ring-shaped vessel: it belonged to the late Ven Urre, whom Kos defeated months ago.

The trajectory analysis completes and her screens are filled with hundreds of orbit lines; she thrusts the vessel upwards ever so slightly, adjusting the Acolyte’s orbit to avoid any collisions. Urre’s monastery, now fully in view, is charred black on one side. Other than that it appears to be intact.

She recalls how another monastery once orbited close to Urre’s, and how she narrowly escaped before its untimely detonation at the hands of its monk, Ven Chel. Both the death toll of that tragedy and the loss of the monastery were humbling, a turning point in Liss’s worldview. It was then she finally realized how volatile the merchant order had become, and how its backwards traditions could fuel the very selfishness it sought to negate.

Kos told this same damning tale on the other worlds to emphasize the need for change. On those worlds, Liss’s arrival in the shipping lanes had been enough to get her an audience with the planet’s economic leaders, to whom she would predict Kos’s arrival and prepare them for the truth of the old order—and the necessity for a new one.

Here above Ternos, however, she encounters only derelicts and debris. Not a single ship scavenges the wrecks, and below in the night the capital burns. She magnifies the image and gasps at the smoke-laced white city below. Illa, her home, has suffered more from Chel’s anger than Liss could have imagined.

She rallies and hails the planet. "Open comms. Acolyte to Illa ground control: do you read?" There is no response. She repeats the call; still no response. She waits a moment, hoping her message is just being scrambled by asteroid ring. Her patience rewards only radio static.

She closes the line and begins her descent.

A whole Ternosian day—six hours from dawn to dawn—passes before Kos arrives in his monastery. It gives Liss enough time to learn about the last two months on Ternos.

Following the explosion, great pieces of Chel’s ship fell to the surface. Most landed in the desert but twelve of them crashed into the city. Worst of all, three of the five wind generator spires at the city center were shredded by falling fragments, leaving everyone without power. Law enforcement, after losing many officers in the ensuing uprisings, fortified key positions in the city and now rarely leaves those bastions to keep the peace outside them. The Executor has not been seen in weeks and is presumed dead.

Overlooking Illa from a rocky ledge, Liss thinks some of the still-burning towers could collapse at any moment. She scans the overcrowded spaceport. The orbiting debris rendered spaceflight prohibitively dangerous so the transport authority ordered all ships grounded. Now hundreds of those ships are sinking into the desert sands.

Her homeworld, once a bustling center of mining and commerce, has come to a smouldering standstill at the hands of a monk. Liss looks up and sees Ilos’s monastery orbiting above, piloted by Kos. From wandering the dusty streets, Liss learned that the citizens believe Kos is guilty of foul play and blame him for this atrocity. She would too, if she had seen what they saw months ago: Kos’s monastery departing, then Chel’s being consumed by an enormous explosion.

The Ternosians think their native Ilos is aboard that monastery. When they find out Kos has killed their favoured son and has returned to Ternos victorious, they will want to tear him apart.

She returns to the Acolyte and heads for the communications room.

The grand monk, wearing a grey cloak cinched at the chest and with head shaven, listens as Liss gives her report. Her blue hologram stands between him and the window overlooking the desert world. Streaks of smoke rise from Illa in the morning sun.

They’re going to want blood, Kos. It doesn’t matter if you’re the grand monk—as far as Ternos is concerned, you don’t deserve the title. They’ve been unprotected from the desert for months without leadership or law and will break at the slightest provocation.

I can provide aid, he says. I have food and medicine. They will have it at no cost.

Monks have always given with one hand and taken with the other, here most of all, Liss replies. The people will be suspicious if you open negotiations that way. Besides, your ground crews would need guards and that might be the spark the people need.

Yes, my first avenue of diplomacy is risky, Kos agrees. He paces slightly, turning from Liss’s image. Next would usually be a victorious public appearance, but that is out of the question. He turns back to her. What about Urre’s crew? They are still aboard his monastery. Returning his Ternosians and mine should be seen as an act of good faith.

Maybe, Liss says. On the monastery they have food, water and power. You would be releasing them to a world in flames. There would be a lot of discontent, even from Ternosians being reunited with their families.

A rock and a hard place, then. But I need to make an inroad somewhere. The lesser of two evils might have to suffice.

Or both at once, Liss suggests. If you simultaneously release Urre’s crew and send your own aid—along with any of Urre’s supplies—the good and the bad of both messages might negate each other.

Or they might augment each other, Kos counters. I do see the logic there, though. ‘Anything and everything in my power’ comes to mind.

Exactly.

And the sooner the better, he continues. The longer I wait, the more it seems I am deliberately planning something.

You are. We are.

I know. But Ternos is different than the other worlds. It is burning before my eyes. However much we need to deal with public opinion, the people need help first and foremost. Liss nods in agreement. I need to go to Urre’s monastery. Keep your finger on the pulse. Be safe.

I will.

The channel closes. Kos tells the stooped, black-robed keeper waiting nearby to prepare his shuttle. As he turns from the window, he reminds himself to focus on the people, not just of Ternos but of all the seven worlds. It is easy to let his mission become a series of political power plays, a marionette dance on the stage of public opinion in which he is both the puppet and the puppeteer.

Never has the truth felt so fabricated.

Evening falls on Illa as Kos returns from Urre monsatery to monitor reports from the planet.

Urre’s crew suffered minor casualties from the blast: only one of his fifty-two freighters was lost. The remaining crew followed Kos’s instructions without question, transferring to his monastery and bringing freighters of supplies planetside. They accepted his explanation about Chel’s monastery with an unnerving lack of emotion. He could not tell if it was stoicism or apathy, but hoped their levelheadedness would soothe Ternos.

It does exactly the opposite.

The people, seeing their spouses and children, sisters and brothers returned with aid in hand, are initially overjoyed. This act goes against what they would expect of a monk, even their kindred Ilos. When they discover it is Kos, not Ilos in the monastery above, however, opinions change just as Liss predicted. The enraged majority outshouts the moderate freighter crews, accusing them of collusion and treason, and the riots begin.

Kos stands motionless as he closes the communication link to his ships and watches Illa fall into the blackness of night. By his face, one might think him stoic, impassive, even at peace. These are a monk’s crowning characteristics, after all. Beneath that serenity, however, his soul quakes under a crushing wave of frustration. Never has a world so needed his help and been so unwilling to accept it. Now of all times, too—he has the Acolyte, the key to their deliverance. He brings a new order but they cannot hear him over the echoes of the old one.

At least they have some supplies.

Kos wants to contact Liss but is sure she is still watching the chaos unfold, gathering intelligence in that uncanny way of hers, blending into the crowd as if she is one of them. This time she is one of them, he thinks, and wonders if she uses her real name on her home planet.

He considers how immeasurably valuable she has become. That she wants to disappear after this is over—from him, from the worlds, from herself—makes him shake his head without willing it. He could not have done this himself, even with the Acolyte in his possession. Without Liss he would be truly alone: all his fellow monks are gone, three of them slain by his own hand.

Perhaps he can understand her desire to disappear.

Liss tries her best to be heard above the crush of people.

Commissioner Renek, you need to speak with him! She shouts over the crowd, pressed into close quarters with the man in stained and tattered robes. Liss is not the only one vying for his attention—with the Executor gone, the trade commissioner is the most influential person on the planet.

Yes, water distribution will begin shortly, he assures another person as he is