To Reign in Hell: Volant Flyway 2

By Alfred D Byrd

Two years after the violent suppression of the People’s Assembly, the survivors live on either in the increasingly repressive Volant Habitat or as exiles on Mars. But the hopes of the Mars Now Movement for terraforming the Red Planet have been suppressed and are facing extinction. When Peter Erica Carmen and his students are told that they must destroy all their plants and hard work, they fight back: Peter by running for the position of Delegate to the General Assembly of Mars, and others resorting to deviously terrorist ways. Meanwhile, the beloved Queen of the Volants, imprisoned in her palace by her Prime Minister, starts her own clandestine operation to learn the truth of what is happening. As the conspirators on Mars face the consequences of their own actions, tensions in Volant Habitat reach the point of explosion. Will Volant dreams of flying free on Mars be crushed by tyranny?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dead Fish Books
• Release date: Aug 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005939304

Book preview

To Reign in Hell

Volant Flyway 2

Alfred D. Byrd

Dead Fish Books

2022

To Reign in Hell Volant Flyway 2

Copywrite 2022 by Dead Fish Books

Smashwords edition.

All Rights Reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

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Cover design by Helen E Davis

Photo Credit www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/PIA02406.html

Table of Contents

Start of TO REIGN IN HELL

Previously in The Volant Flyway

About Alfred D Byrd

NICHOLAS ONE

I MUST BE losing my mind, Nicholas thought.

He shook his head as he glided along a docking boom to a waiting shuttle. No, losing my mind is what this trip will keep me from doing. Still, he wondered why he was being cast out of Volant Habitat to spend the rest of his life in exile on Mars.

While languishing in a jail cell barely an hour before, facing a sentence of radical personality reconstruction, a pair of guards flung the cell’s door open. They hauled him to a courtroom where his own lawyer, Lucinda, had browbeat him into pleading guilty to trumped-up charges of insurrection. It bothered no one that he had already been in prison when the supposed insurrection took place. As the guards dragged him from the courtroom, Lucinda said, I did this in your best interests, Nicholas.

Yeah, right.

On the way to the docking bay, the lawyer told him that the trial was part of a chain of events to rescue Nicholas’s cousin Cecilia and her fiancé, the firebrand Peter Erica Carmen, from their own encounter with the zombie treatment. For Nicholas’s inclusion on the list of insurrectionists to enter exile, Peter and Cecilia had traded their cooperation with the authorities who had bloodily put down the People’s Assembly. You’d best be grateful, Lucinda said.

Nicholas snorted. I’m your everlasting slave.

In the docking bay, Nicholas, to his delight, put off the shuttle’s launch when Lucinda forced the guards to send for someone to remove restraints that had hobbled his wings. During the delay, Nicholas sorrowfully watched Lady Julia renounce her title in the Volant nobility. Bemused, he watched his cousin and Peter get married in a hasty ceremony by one of the leaders of a renegade Roman Catholic religious order that Cecilia had wanted to join. When technicians, arriving, removed the restraints, the exiles were herded into the docking boom.

Maybe, I should feel grateful. Nicholas shrugged. Feeling wing membranes ripple freely for the first time in weeks, he smiled. Yes, life could be worse for me.

~

Inside the shuttle, three of four pairs of seats were already filled. On his left, two tall Basic men wearing the red battle armor of Federation of Martian States Security eyed him and fingered dart-rifles. His stomach now queasy, not just from lack of gravity, Nicholas gave the Red Helmets a weak grin that neither of them returned to him. Still, it would have astonished him if either of them had returned it. Their reputation for toughness was legendary around Mars.

Ahead of them, Abigail and Leah, a pair of young poets who had gotten caught up in Peter’s campaign for emigration to Mars, enfolded each other in their wings. Clearly, they were on their way to becoming lovemates.

Across the aisle from the two women, Peter and Cecilia were drowning in each other’s eyes. Nicholas snorted. Two weeks ago, she wanted to be a nun; now, she’s found a lovemate for life. You never really know anyone, do you? I guess that the two seats left are for me and—

His eyes widened. Turning, he found Julia, outrageously long and slender wingtips fanning the air behind her crest, standing in the hatchway. Glancing at the empty seats, she cocked her head at him.

Nicholas licked his lips. Would you like the window seat, milady?

Four Volant heads turned towards him; four pairs of eyes widened. "Was it Nicholas who said that?" Abigail called out.

He’s a changed man, Leah replied to her.

Eat frass, Nicholas thought.

Julia smiled slightly. You no longer need call me ‘milady,’ Nicholas. I’m a commoner now, just like you.

You could never be common in my eyes.

His words astonished even himself. The other two pairs of Volants frankly gaped at him.

Once he was seated by Julia, the intercom blared out a warning for passengers to strap themselves in; then the shuttle lurched. In a porthole over Julia’s shoulder, the docking boom moved off. The shuttle lurched in a different direction. Nicholas’s stomach churned as Volant Habitat’s vast bulk turned—

There’s a motion-sickness inhaler in a kit under each seat, one of the Red Helmets said.

Nicholas clamped his jaw. I’ll be damned if I’ll let a Flatface see a Volant get space sick.

As the thirty-kilometer-long cylinder that had been his home dwindled from a star-occulting wall to a twinkling point of light, his eyes watered. It’s sad, isn’t it, Julia? he whispered to her. All we’ve known is up there…

She made no reply. Head drifting aimlessly, eyes closed, she breathed through her mouth.

Forward, Cecilia and Peter, too, were unconscious. What’s with this group? Nicholas called out.

Quiet! Abigail whispered sharply. They got pulled out of stasis just a couple of hours ago. They’ve done well to stay awake this long.

Nicholas nodded and then let out a sigh of relief. Now that he thought of things, he was still hardly up to a long talk with Julia. He thought of what he might say to a noblewoman now a commoner…

~

The shuttle circled Mars several times in descending from areosynchronous orbit. Nicholas tried to familiarize himself with his new home. On the planet’s night side, cities’ faint lights glowed; on its day side, an ochre wasteland stretched from pole to pole. Peter had claimed in his speeches that genetically engineered terrestrial plants were spreading across that waste, and human beings could briefly breathe the air. From orbit, no evidence for either claim appeared.

Nicholas was impressed by the titanic scars of Valles Marineris, which seemed to split the world nearly in two at the equator. Far to the canyon’s southeast lay the vast bowl of Hellas Planitia. Its depths did hold patches of green. Somewhere along the crater’s southern cliffs lay the dome of Scheherazade, straddling a hanging valley’s walls. There, Peter had claimed, Volants and Basics had learned to live together in peace.

I hope he’s right. Glancing at the Red Helmets on his left, Nicholas shook his head. His early training in the Qur’an had held no mention of security guards in Paradise.

The sleepers awoke as the shuttle hit atmosphere, and deceleration pressed them back in their seats. Julia grumbled as protective screens slid over the shuttle’s windows. The screens reopened a few minutes later to reveal a strange violet-reddish expanse. Nicholas fought down another attack of vertigo. He had seen holos of skies, but never a sky in real life.

The desert’s ochre expanse began to climb the windows. At last, it covered them. The shuttle jolted as its landing wheels lowered and touched the ground. The shuttle taxied to a low, domed building, whence an airlock connection ran out to dock with the hatch. An intercom blared out, We’ve arrived at Hellas Planitia Spaceport. You may now release your restraints. Welcome to the Federation of Martian States!

~

For the next half hour or so, Nicholas felt decidedly unwelcome. For one thing, he had to adapt to gravity. His schooling, such as it was, told him that it was indistinguishable from Coriolis. His inner ear told him otherwise.

For another thing, he and all the other exiles faced an impressively thorough search. A tearful Cecilia and a livid Peter held this up with a tremendous argument with the Red Helmets. Why are they putting up such a fuss? Nicholas thought. His face burned as he recalled that the others lacked his extensive experience with the procedure. It was rough the first time.

At length, Nicholas and the others stood in a group by an exit. Well, Peter, Abigail said, what should we do about transportation?

He cocked his head at her. Transportation? We fly! We’re just ten kilometers from the city’s south entrance.

Julia laughed. Don’t be absurd! How will we carry our luggage…

Her mouth gaped, her eyes widened, and her wingtips dropped nearly to the ground. O-oh…

Abigail smirked. There aren’t enough econs in the System to ship all of your stuff down from the Habitat.

Julia needs help, Nicholas thought. Don’t worry. Peter’s a professor, isn’t he? He can buy you things—

A look from Cecilia made him turn his head. That wasn’t a Christian expression.

~

Preparing for outdoor flight on Mars held challenges for the new arrivals. Peter said that, though the air was breathable if one used no energy, one needed a respirator for flight. Also, one’s skin needed protection from drying and sunburn.

Nicholas gladly helped Julia spray monomolecular film onto her exposed surfaces. He enjoyed her ministrations to him even more. This is a kinky first date, he said. She rewarded him with a laugh.

Putting on his respirator, he followed Peter and the others onto the surface. He shivered in cold air; then he looked up at the sky—

~

They aren’t the first to throw up in a respirator, Peter said. He looked down at a bench where Nicholas and Leah lay head-to-head. If the two of you don’t feel up to flying, I can rent a hovercar—

Julia would despise me forever, Nicholas thought. I feel better already. Liar. I’m willing to try again. After all, Leah will never —

I guess I am, too. I must get used to flying outdoors sometime.

Space her! After a moment, Nicholas told himself, Spacing wouldn’t work here. What do Martians do with persons they don’t want?

A few minutes later, he was back outdoors in a new respirator. This time, he overcame his instinctive fear of the strange perspective in which the world’s walls curved down, and a void overhead might suck him into infinity. After a while longer, he rose into the sky and overcame the strange phenomenon of wind. Falling into line with the others, he set out across the desert.

Fascination gripped him as every wing beat brought a fresh perspective over the horizon. Rills, boulders, and hillocks, lichens, sagebrush, and sparse stands of grass — all were new and marvelous. Ahead, a dome rose over the world’s edge. Gradually, it grew, revealing orchards and fields, cliffs from which Volants dove and soared, and a valley from which towers rose.

Nicholas’s heart swelled. This is my home now. No one will drive me from it.

~

Recalling this thought two years later, he laughed at his presumption.

PETER ONE

LOST IN THOUGHT, Peter Erica Carmen was trudging down the Judiciary Complex’s steps when a heavy blow staggered him.

Watch where you’re going, freak! a deep voice called out above him.

Peter looked up, ready to apologize for getting in someone else’s way. Noticing braids in a Basic’s long, blond hair and beard, and scars on his cheeks and forehead, Peter changed his mind about apologizing. What’s this? Have you come here to turn yourself in?

The Hair’s blue eyes narrowed and blazed. Don’t give me any of your beak, birdman, or I’ll—

Is there a problem here?

Peter turned as another Basic man, a Red Helmet, came down the steps, dart rifle at ready. Peter tensed, but then, noticing that the guard had jacked in the cartridge for Basics, relaxed.

Yeah, this muddled get of a construct ran into me—

The guard gave the Hair a wintry smile. Untrue, sir. I saw what you did. Move off before I—

Rutting bird-lover, you—

Now!

Muttering, the Hair swept past the guard and Peter and on into the building. The guard, turning to Peter, smiled wryly. I’m sorry, Dr. Carmen. I should’ve run him in, but so many are worse than he is…

I understand, officer Peter said. He was unsurprised at the guard’s recognizing him after the nuisance that he had made of himself to the Martian government over the past two years. Seldom does notoriety work out to my advantage. Thank you for stepping in.

My job, sir, the guard said. Smiling again at Peter, he returned up the stairs.

Peter, thinking again of the Hair, shuddered. It still bothered him that he had brought Cecilia onto Mars. It comforted him little that, as bad as it was, it was still better than Volant Habitat. According to Dante, the Inferno has many circles.

Peter recalled with guilt how, when he had brought his fellow-exiles through Scheherazade’s southern gate, he had turned to them and said, I may’ve painted too rosy a picture of life here.

When he had spoken of the Hairs, the Volant-hating Basic gangs, and the Cutwings, the Basic-hating Volant gangs, Nicholas, Julia, and Abigail had nodded and smiled knowingly. They had clearly expected Paradise to have a serpent. Cecilia had stared off in silence until Peter feared that she was terminally enraged with him. At last, she nodded, a resolute look on her face, and said, We’ll just have to change all of that.

Peter smiled. Not for lack of trying…

Abruptly, he recalled the news that he had just gotten. Again, he was cast down. Another door had closed in his face. Where do I go from here?

He guessed that he could go to his office to start putting together tomorrow’s lecture, or to the greenhouse to look in on progress of work that would likely never be used, or to start organizing a shovel brigade—

Or I could go cry on Cecilia’s shoulder. She does deserve to hear the news from me before it reaches her from an unfriendly source.

Going down the rest of the stairs to the plaza, he took a running start and rose in flight. For a moment, he enjoyed the illusion of rising towards an endless violet sky; then the illusion was spoiled by a row of two-kilometer-wide arches, between which stretched a thin, tough, self-renewing membrane pressed outward by air pressure. Again, he saw Scheherazade’s dome as an impressive technological achievement, but also as a barrier that he had failed to remove — a barrier between Volants and the sky, their birthright.

Lowering his gaze from the sky, he set his course south along a hanging valley that had been domed to make Scheherazade. Below him, the kilometer-wide square of the governmental complex gave way to three broad north-south parkways that framed the Basics’ apartment complexes. These were still deep in shadow this early in the morning, as were long strips of parkland and greenhouses under the eastern cliff.

Below the western cliff, the topmost towers of Scheherazade University had begun to glow in sunlight. Cut high along the cliff ran long, multiple rows of Volant apartments — Cliffside Landing on his left, and First Eyrie and Morning View on his right. Above the cliffs lay long strips of meadows for pastures, farms, and orchards.

The city struck Peter as a tiny, self-contained world — safe, comfortable, and unchallenging — willfully excluding the menace of vast Martian deserts. No wonder no one wants to tear the dome down. Most prefer safety to growth.

As Peter glided over the Ecology Building, he thought of a vast pile of work that had likely built up on his monitor. Repressing a twinge of guilt, he flew on past his office. Tomorrow’s soon enough for me to start to tear down all I’ve built.

He banked to the right, towards the second level of Morning View — home.

~

As he landed, he stared in discontent at dwellings in which he had condemned his wife and son to live. Behind a barren, eight-meter-deep ledge for landings, a long row of tiny caves hewed from rock was divided by hangings into rooms barely large enough for spread wings. Sliding panels gave each cave little enough privacy for its occupants. How can Cecilia truly say she’s happy here? When she had come to Mars, he had told her that the apartments were temporary—

He snorted. The Volants who built them nearly three hundred years ago said so, too.

Sliding open the panel to his living room, he stepped over a fence meant to keep Harold from crawling out. Cecilia, sitting in the room’s rear right-hand corner, was nursing Harold under one wing. Peter began to call out a greeting, but she said first, Did the decision on the appeal come down?

Peter nodded. By a vote of five to four, the court upheld the original decision. No more plantings.

He settled onto the floor by Cecilia. To make things worse, the court upheld the provision on woody, flowering, and broad-leafed plants. We must dig up all of those we’ve planted in Hellas Planitia—

Cecilia’s eyes flashed; her wings mantled. Outrageous!

Harold began to squall, waving tiny fists. Cecilia began to hum at him and rock him.

Peter went on. I don’t know what I should do now. Every move I’ve made has been blocked. Sometimes, I think I’ve never done any real good—

Don’t say that! You’ve done lots of good. If nothing else, I’ll always be grateful for what you’ve done for Nicholas in getting him down here and into school. Surely, you’ll think of something else to do. If for no other reason, you’ll do it for your family.

Peter smiled at her weakly. For you, anything.

She smiled back. Good! She thrust Harold into his arms. Start by changing the baby.

Peter laughed. Cecilia never loses touch with reality.

NICHOLAS TWO

LOWER AND TO THE LEFT, please.

Nicholas grinned. He shifted where he was putting oil onto Julia’s left wing. Life was better than he could have imagined its being two years back.

Recalling his exile, he could still hardly believe how things had worked out for him. For one thing, Julia and he had gotten together and amazingly stayed together. Arguably, they were even married. At least, in response to a question of Cecilia’s, they had said that they would take care of any children conceived between them. That answer would have made them married enough for most Volants, though not for Cecilia, who dreamed of great ceremonies linking her to Paradise.

Nicholas wondered how he had held Julia’s interest. Did she, as a fallen noblewoman, embrace him as a means to assert her newfound commonness, or were he and Julia, as Abigail snidely suggested, kindred spirits? You two deserve each other, she liked to say. As long as you’re together, you’re not inflicting yourselves on anyone else.

He and Julia had enrolled in the university and were taking courses to make them suitable assistants for Peter in his work of terraforming Mars. Julia was far ahead of Nicholas in coursework, but he, to everyone’s openly expressed astonishment, was catching up with her.

Too, a year before, he and Julia, in a common ceremony with Peter, Cecilia, Abigail, and Leah, had gained Martian citizenship. I’ll have much tell Dad when he gets here.

Nicholas’s hands faltered at their task. Dad.

Below him Julia sighed. Your heart isn’t really in this, is it? Are you still worried about meeting your father?

Nicholas shook his head. He could never get over how Julia could read his mind. (Abigail might sniff and say, It’s such a simple text.) I guess so.

Julia, rising, re-fastened her jumper’s straps over her shoulders. Why don’t you talk to me?

He shrugged. What can I say? He’s been in deep space for five years — in deep sleep for most of that time. I haven’t seen him and have hardly spoken with him since he left. While he turned the sun into just another star, I’ve gotten arrested Simorgh knows how many times, nearly gotten the zombie treatment, gotten thrown off the Habitat, begun school, and live in the same house with an houri from Paradise—

Julia smiled. Did someone civilize you while I wasn’t looking? Still, it sounds to me as if you’ll have plenty to tell your father. We’d best leave if we’re going to meet him at the spaceport.

~

Nicholas, sighing, followed her onto the ledge outside his apartment. His unease became delight as Julia took flight before him. It still amazed him that, even though others could look at her magnificent wingspread, he alone could touch it.

He laughed to himself, recalling when he had told Julia that those wings were his. With more than a trace of frost, she had replied to him, "They’re mine. I just share them with you." After my remark, I’m lucky she still shares them with me. Someday, my brain will get connected to my mouth.

Following her into the air, he banked after her to the right towards the city’s southern part. It struck him that morning, as it had not struck him for some time, what a joke of Shaitan flying in Scheherazade was. Its transparent dome gave one an illusion of infinite space, but the city was in the end just a cage for him. Still, for the past five years, his father had been flying in a holographic simulator. As Cecilia might have said, Someone’s always worse off than we are.

As he flew over the Ecology Building, Nicholas made a mental note to get a tape of the third-semester ecology course that he would miss that morning. He regretted not being able to be there to ask questions.

He wondered what the Nicholas of two years back would have thought of him. Simorgh! Maybe, I am becoming respectable.

His thought vaguely terrified him.

~

He and Julia flew on over the wide expanse of Westgate Mall, built in the mouth of a side canyon in the western cliff, and then on down the center of the narrowing main canyon. From the top of the western cliff, some Basics, scantily clad in vividly colored scraps of Spandex, waved at the two Volants and invited them to come visit them. Nicholas pretended not to hear the Basics. He was glad to see Julia do likewise. It was an open question whether they would have savaged her more than him.

Bloody Hairs!

In some respects, life in Scheherazade had turned out to be worse than life in Volant Habitat was, especially in terms of gangs. The city had not one, but two sets of them, divided along species lines on the basis of inter-species hatred. On the Basic side, the Hairs marked themselves with long, braided hair, and beards. The Hairs ran the alleys on the canyon’s floors, the lifts to the tops of the cliffs, and the land above the southwestern cliffs, where orchards made landings and takeoffs difficult for Volants.

On the Volant side, Cutwings distinguished themselves with elaborate ritual scarification. They ran the upper airspace and farmland above the eastern cliff. Nicholas, to his astonishment, had so far shown sense — and luck — enough to steer clear of both groups.

He wondered how long his luck would last. Trouble’s never had to look far for me.

~

At length, he and Julia landed at Southgate and boarded a bus for the spaceport. On the trip there, his uneasiness returned. He still had no idea of what he could say to his father. What Julia suggested to me sounds like the high-class chatter she made when she was a courtier in the Hanging Palace.

It struck Nicholas that he had been barely an adolescent when he said goodbye to his father five years back. To make things worse, Julia began to pour out reminiscences of her days as a maid-in-waiting entertaining space miners home on layover. Under his annoyance, Nicholas wondered about her topic of conversation. Julia seldom