Hey guys!
With 4,400 words this one's a bit on the longer side, but you don't have to read it all, of course.
If at anytime you feel bored - just let me know where (and why) you've stopped reading. Otherwise, feel free to rip it apart - grammar, structure, plot, possible cuts, tense or POV shifts (there aren't supposed to be any, but there's a big chance I've messed up in places), anything that you think can be improved on!
I'm also concerned whether I have a bit too much of info-dumping going on at one point, and whether the story would benefit if that bit would be cut out entirely. Also, if you feel that it becomes a too much tell-not-show sort of deal somewhere, let me know.
But if you decide to just leave a general comment, that's helpful too! Thanks a bunch in advance!
- - -
A Tale of Swords and Sorcery
4,400 words
- - -
The two curved swords clashed in a fountain of sparks. Lemrin struck again and again, every single time hitting nothing but his opponent’s blade. He thrust his sword forward, but the self-proclaimed King of Khrul side-stepped and elbowed him in the ear. Lemrin fell down on the cold metal of the ancient spaceship’s roof, rolled over, and got back up. He was about to die.
Three hours ago, Lemrin, still aboard the ISV Miyamoto, had been trying his best to avoid meeting any archivists in the ship's narrow corridors. They’ve all ready picked up everyone from the planet, and the new batch of loners hadn’t been teleported surface side yet, so the medium sized Imperial Space Vessel was getting rather crowded.
Lemrin never liked the folk. They all had their degrees, sure. Xenozoologist, astrophysicists, biologists, Imperial Officers, yeah, but who in their right mind would want to spend three years on some god forsaken rock surrounded by medieval-armor toting primitives?
In his experience, most of the men and women who volunteered for the archivist gig were either loners or misanthropes, or sometimes both. The thought about Imperial Officers made him realize that he could end up bumping into Jason. As fate would have it, it had to be their ship that got the assignment to pick up the archivists from Kibou when one them just so happened to have been his wife’s ex-boyfriend.
He passed the corridor, took a left, and retreated into his lab.
A single matchbox lay on Lemrin's workbench, exactly how he left it. Like magicians of old, he would stare at it for minutes at a time, trying to wish it into disappearing. So far he hadn’t achieved any better results than those who tried the trick before him, but Lemrin had something they didn’t. Namely, he spent weeks applying the basic principles of teleportation to his own brand of nanotech. The idea was to force the object to go into the initial stage of teleportation – complete atomic disassembly – and then to deny its return to original state.
If he could only make it work, then there would be no more need for anti-asteroid weaponry on space vessels, or for wearing down tunnel drills, or for spending so many man-hours in the mines. Nanotechnicians like him would simply wish obstacles out of existence.
“Hey, Julia,” said Lemrin to his wife as she entered the lab.
“Hi, babe.”
Julia’s usually spotless uniform had sweat marks on it, her traditional dual swords - the pride and joy of any Imperial Officer - were misaligned, and she had that same look in her eyes that she had when she explained to Lemrin that they will have her swords hanging above their bunk bed when they were sleeping, and that there was not a damned thing in hell that he could do about it.
“It’s Jason,” she said. It wasn’t exactly her talent for subtlety that made Lemrin fall in love with her. He expected her to say that name the second the airlock doors slid open, but he felt his fingers tightening their grip around the workbench’s edges nevertheless.
“What about him?”
“He never reported in,” she said, her hand resting on her longer sword, “All the other archivists are onboard and have been accounted for. I’m coming down to get him.”
“What?” as idiotic as it was, Lemrin couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“If he’s missing, don’t you think the Empire would send some sort of a search and rescue squad for him?” he went on, “Or maybe it’s nothing and he would be turning up any minute now?”
“No, it’s not nothing, Lemrin. They spent three years, three frigging years on that rock surrounded by people who still think that drilling holes in your skull is good treatment for headaches. Yesterday there wasn’t a single archivist a minute too late to hit the surface teleports. Not one but Jason.”
Lemrin’s fingers refused to let go of the bench.
“And,” she continued, “There would be no rescue squads. It’s not like archivists are valuable commodity, Lemrin.”
Lemrin knew his wife too well to realize that there wasn’t anything he could say or do to change her mind, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
“Look,” he started.
“No, you look,” she said, “I’m the Head of Security on this ship, and probably the only person aboard who can handle the job. But more than that, I am an Imperial Officer. And we don’t leave our own behind.”
She turned around and exited the lab. Lemrin stared at the door that closed behind her for what felt like ages. He finally released the workbench and lowered his eyes.
The matchbox was gone.
He pondered his situation for a while. What could he do – ask the captain to let them go together? He’d be laughed off the command deck. But he knew too well that Julia and Jason went way back before he even met her. They trained in the Academy together, for gods’ sakes. And he wasn’t about to let that comradeship, or whatever the military called it, get a fresh breath of air.
So he did the only thing he deemed sane. He waited for Julia to make the jump surface side, tossed the best of his nanotech in his sling bag, and then sneaked into the ship’s teleport chamber. He thought about making a normal, risk-free jump to the planet’s teleportation cocoon, but then decided against it. He’d be losing the element of surprise. He tracked down Julia’s jump coordinates, and adjusted them so that he’d exit his own jump someplace nearby.
He climbed into the cocoon, closed the door, and flipped the lever. There was a flash.
Open Coordinates Teleportation wasn’t for the faint of heart. Lemrin could have ended up with his legs in one part of the kingdom and his face planted half-way through an alien boulder in another, but he wouldn’t have let something like the risk of terrible accidental death stand in his way.
He bent over and threw up. Every single cell in his body felt like it had been turned to liquid fire and then frozen back solid.
Lemrin was standing on a narrow path, a sea, or perhaps an ocean, visible on the way down. What looked like a fishermen’s settlement stood on its shore. The grass that grew along the path still held morning dew on its blades. Looking up the hill, he could see a tower on the horizon.
He noted that he wasn’t being pursued – at least, not yet – and started walking towards the edifice.
The tower turned out to be nothing but a run-down windmill, but the entrance was blocked with a force field. Imperial tech. He knew that all archivists were supposed to have their own outposts on the planet, so he figured he wasn’t too far from his goal. Lemrin disabled it with a thoughtswitch override and showed himself in.
A busy-looking stone slab stood in the centre of the room. The tower’s other comforts included a bed and an improvised weights machine that took up all the little space that remained.
Lemrin never met his wife’s ex-boyfriend in person, but he remembered seeing an old shirtless photograph of him once, so the weights machine came as little surprise.
He turned his attention back to the slab and cleared the surface. Rags, plasma cartridges, microchips, and a dry half-eaten loaf of bread all fell to the floor to reveal a standard issue thoughtcube melted into the stone.
He touched the cube, and with a fizzling noise, it projected three holographic screens across the room. One was a map of the Kingdom of Khrul, the other showed a rotating model of a badly damaged derelict space ship, and the last one appeared to have been Jason’s personal log.
The log was encrypted, of course, but Lemrin could still figure out enough to know that Jason hadn’t signed in for months. All things considered, there was a good chance that Julia’s rescue attempt had been way overdue. Or perhaps not, he thought. His imagination was all too quick to draw a picture of her in Jason’s arms. He clenched his fists. Of course, if it hadn’t been Jason, it could have simply been somebody else, but hell, this was no time for philosophizing.
He threw another look at the central display. This ship’s image had been on all major networks two decades ago, back when ISV Leaky Bucket’s navigator miscalculated a jump to nearby system and, via a barrage of other improbable circumstances, discovered planet Kibou.
To everyone’s surprise, Kibou turned out to be inhabited by humans still living in a medieval level of technological advancement. The mystery was solved when Imperial Fleet Officers found records of a colonist ship disappearing near the planet’s coordinates nearly six centuries ago, years before the Solar Empire’s time.
After long debates between the Empire’s most critically acclaimed philosophers, anthropologists, and politicians, the government’s consensus was to establish a number of outposts on the planet where volunteers would spend thirty six month long shifts learning about the local society and keeping a lookout in case anything went terribly wrong.
As if the Kibouians would suddenly discover nuclear fission, he thought.
Otherwise, the Empire decided the people of Kibou had nothing to offer, and would probably be better left the hell alone in the long run anyway.
He left Jason’s outpost and headed down the path. By now he was sure that if he was to expect trouble, it wouldn’t be coming from Miyamoto’s crew. He hoped the captain reasoned that a jealousy stricken nanotechnican was far less important than any potential risk to a year’s worth of archivist’s data.
The village was submerged in early dawn’s fog. After traversing a maze of wooden shacks, pieces of boats, and hanging fishnets, Lemrin ended up at the seashore.
Three men were pushing a small lugger into the waves. The Kibouians were barefoot, their patched up clothing a murky green color, and, apart from their impending physiques, they could have easily passed for less privileged citizens in New Tokyo slums.
Lemrin stepped up and raised his hands in what he hoped was a friendly gesture. The only Imperials who knew Khrul’s language were either scholars, linguists, or archivists, so he had to make do with what he had.
“Hi,” he said.
The men stared. Lemrin reeked of vomit and sweat, so he hadn’t exactly expected them to fall to their knees and pronounce him their god – he represented a more advanced civilization the same way a roadkill represented the entire genome of ferrets.
He had enough nanotech with him half of Khrul into a pile of smoking planks and rubble, but that did little to dismiss the feeling that he was about to catch a face full of oar.
“Have you seen someone like me here recently?” he asked, opening up his weathered lab coat. He pointed to the Solar Empire emblem on his jumpsuit.
“You know, like a foreign person?”
One of the men reached out for Lemrin’s sleeve. He instinctively stepped back. The man then said a few words – least, Lemrin thought they were words – in his language. It sounded like a bad mix of old Earth’s English and pigeon.
“Wait,” Lemrin said, and raised his index finger to stress his point, “I’ll show you.”
He pulled out a pocket recompiler from his bag, the one that resembled a small marble. Lemrin thought of a simple algorithm and thoughtfed it into the device. The marble turned to liquid, pouring through his fingers and into the sand.
A mist started to form where the liquid met the beach. It rose, pulling in the surrounding sand into a vertical vortex. A human silhouette became more and more distinct at the epicenter. First the boots, then the legs and the short blade at her side, then her arms, longer sword in hand, then finally, the face.
“There,” said Lemrin, pointing at Julia’s full-height replica and feeling quite proud of his work, “Seen her around lately?”
The Kibouians faces reflected a look of absolute terror. They backed up, first slowly, then turned and took off at a speed that’d make a pro sprinter jealous. It wasn’t until they were many meters away that they started screaming.
“Wait, hold up!” Lemrin shouted. He thought that perhaps he overdid it with the swords. But no matter – if the mountain doesn’t come to the mad scientist, the mad scientist invents the matter disintegrator and cuts the mountain down.
A teleport cocoon should have been somewhere nearby. Closed Coordinates Teleportation was safe, precise, and usually didn’t involve vomiting all over yourself when you got there. Its jumps were also very easy to track.
Alien shouts filled the air. A crowd of Kibouians was coming at him from the village. Some were half-dressed, probably straight out of bed, but they were all unmistakably armed. They wielded rakes, scythes, clubs, and other implements of explicit bodily harm. Lemrin’s three fishermen acquaintances headed the mob.
The prospect of becoming bait for some local carnivore whale did not hold much appeal, so without any further ado, he made an arc around the lugger and ran. He ran and ran, his boots barely touching the sand. The mob followed. A harpoon whistled past his ear and stuck into the sand.
“I come in peace,” Lemrin shouted, increasing his pace. Soon, the beach came to a sudden end at the foot of a steep hill that fused into some sort of a rocky formation. Lemrin made a ninety degree turn and ran alongside. It looked like the Kibouians were finally falling behind. He dived into an opening in the rock and pressed against the cold stone. The mob rushed past.
Lemrin threw a recompiler in the air. The marble hit stone above him and exploded into blue luminescent fog that quickly spread along the cave's ceiling. He could now make out the metallic object standing near the end of the cavern.
He shook his head – the gods must have been on his side this morning – and climbed into the teleport cocoon. Lemrin brought up the coordinates for the previous jump on the control console and flipped the lever. There was a flash.
Way too easy, he thought, pushing the door open.
Lemrin stepped into the spacious room. The mosaic floor showed depictions of feasts, strange animals, and fighting men. Colored stones gave way to the silk banners that hung on the gold plated walls, and intricate carvings ran across the columns that supported the domed ceiling. But the center piece was, of course, the throne. A man sat in it, nodding to a robed figure’s indecipherable speech.
The man turned his head and looked at Lemrin. He dismissed his robed companion with a jerky gesture, and soon they were alone. His royal majesty’s bright clothes were riddled with arcane symbols and he wore a beard and long hair, but there could be no mistake. Lemrin knew that face.
“So,” Lemrin said, “A teleport in the throne room, huh? Not very subtle, if you ask me.”
The king stood up, two Imperial swords hanging at his side.
“Welcome to the Khrul's capital. You must be Lemrin, right?” said Jason.
“And you must be the resident prick. Where’s my wife?”
“We’ve had some, uh, disagreements,” said the former archivist, “I don’t think she appreciates my position here.” He snapped his fingers. The sound echoed through the room. “She’ll be joining us in a minute,” he added.
“I’m not an expert on you archivists,” said Lemrin, “But weren’t you supposed to record local history, not make it?”
“That’s what I thought when I got here, too. But after a year on this rock, I thought – why should others have all the fun? I still go back to my outpost by that fishermen’s village time to time for nostalgia’s sake, but my true place is here now,” Jason tapped his throne.
“Talking about which, where’s the real king?”
“I am the real king!” he said, “But if you’re talking about that poor old childless Kibouian *******, well, he’s in a much better place now.”
Lemrin raised an eyebrow.
“No, no, purely natural causes,” he quickly added, “I had nothing to do with it. However, being the youngest Grand Wizard in Khrul – and believe you me, that ain’t as hard as it sounds with a Mark II blaster at your side – I was the natural choice for the opening.”
Lemrin heard a door open, and Julia was brought in by two guards, one to each side of her. She did not seem hurt, but if looks could kill, then the rage in her eyes could take on all Kibouian armies combined, with the King of Khrul as the first man in line.
The guards were monsters of men, towering high above Julia in their full plate armor suits. Their helmets were visibly bent – not without his wife’s help, Lemrin thought – and both carried impressively sized maces at their sides. One of them was holding Julia’s two swords in his oversized hand.
“Lemrin!” she shouted, “What in the name of frozen hell are you doing here?”
“Just thought I’d drop by. Come on, you think I’d just sit there in my lab while you visit your past love here?” Lemrin nodded at Jason. “It doesn’t really look like he’s in a bad need of a rescue.”
“Well, neither am I. And…”
“Hey,” said Jason, “I’m still here, remember? Your ship won’t be in orbit forever, you know, and then it’s three more years of me against them. Or should I say, ‘us’ against them?”
Jason looked at Julia.
“There is no ‘us,’ Jason,” she said.
“Of course there is. Every king needs a queen, and I’ll be damned if I’m not king!”
“Look, you crazy *******,” said Lemrin, taking a step towards his wife, “How about you just let her go, we jump back to the ship, you go on running your little kingdom, and everybody lives happily ever after?”
Jason pulled out a handgun from under his colorful garments – doubtlessly the Mark II blaster he’d been so fond of – and pointed it at Lemrin’s head.
“How about… No?” he said, “The teleport’s right there, I’m not going to stop you. But she stays. And if you make another step and it’s not to get the hell out of here, it’ll be the last step you make.”
Lemrin took another step.
“I mean it, you freak!” Jason shouted.
To hell with this, Lemrin thought. He leaped for Julia, reaching into his bag mid-jump. At first he didn’t hear the blaster go off, but his subconsciousness still registered the click of Jason pulling the trigger. The energy bolt missed him by a matter of centimeters and tore into one of the throne room’s many columns, encompassing it into a cloud of flying stones.
Lemrin fell on his stomach. His bag flew open. Spherical containers of all sizes rolled across the mozaic floor in a bizarre fountain of nanotech. He turned to his back and saw Julia struggling with her armored escort.
He also saw Jason jump off his throne, blaster in hand, and take careful aim. Some rescue, he thought. He imagined the Imperial Academy, Jason with his hand around Julia’s waist. He imagined them naked, her leaning against his chest.
Something clicked. He remembered the matchbox on his workbench – and now he knew exactly what he felt back in the lab.
It hadn’t been anger.
It had been rage, rage strong enough to tear away at atoms, strong enough to set the very fabric of the universe aflame.
Jason lowered his weapon, watching in surprise as nanomachines turned to liquid and soaked into the floor. The room began to shake. Thoughtswitches went off one by one in Lemrin’s head, nanomachines eating away at the stone, erasing parts of it out of existence.
He got up and reached out for Julia. A crack had materialized between them, separating the room in two. A second ago there was an intricate piece of mozaic, and then it was absolutely nothing but a pitch black gap. Julia rotated her body, and one of her guards fell into the blackness. The second started to flee. Lemrin was standing on the edge, his hand hyper extended over the gap. Just a few centimeters, and he could pull her over, just a few centimeters more...
This time, he heard the shot. The sound was hollow, like a bowling ball hitting a block of cement, and another column exploded into dust. The room continued to shake. The third blaster shot, muffled by the ensuing chaos, was soon followed by Jason’s fading scream. Lemrin tripped, his fist intuitively closing around Julia’s long sword on the floor, and he fell into the darkness.
Lemrin fell and fell and fell.
The stop was both sudden and painful. Lemrin opened his eyes. He lay on the cold, polished surface of what was unmistakably the top of a very large space vessel. Not like any ship he has ever seen before, but the titanium plates bent by meteor showers and the antenna spikes reaching up to the cavern’s ceiling left no room for doubt. It was definitely a space ship. And it hadn’t been one of the Empire’s.
A ray of light illuminated the cave. Lemrin first moved his left leg, then his right. Then his hands, Julia’s sword still firm in his grasp. He somehow managed not to break any bones on the impact.
On the far side of the ship, a figure scooped itself up from the floor. Jason stood by an antenna spike, the once-bright fabric of his clothes now covered in dust. He lost his Mark II blaster and half a sleeve in the fall, but that did little to negate the fact that he had adopted a standard Imperial fighting stance, his long blade in front of him.
There could be only one way this could end. Lemrin unsheathed Julia’s sword.
Jason took a step towards him, both hands on his sword. There was something feline about his features now. He was only a few meters away.
From what Lemrin could remember, Imperial Officers had to prove their swords skills through countless sparring fights to graduate the Academy, and swordsmanship wasn’t exactly on Lemrin's Microcomputing curriculum.
Lemrin calculated his chances of success. Unfortunately for him, he was good at mathematics.
“Wait!” Lemrin shouted.
He held out his left palm, as if asking Jason to stop, and struck.
The two curved swords clashed in a fountain of sparks. Lemrin struck again and again, every single time hitting nothing but his opponent’s blade. He thrust his sword forward, but the King of Khrul side-stepped and elbowed him in the ear. Lemrin fell down on the cold metal of the ancient spaceship’s roof, rolled over, and got back up. He was about to die.
Lemrin made a slashing movement, but Jason jumped out of the way, the arc of nanosharp carbide cutting nothing but air. And then, Jason attacked. He made a false pass, then struck at Lemrin’s blade. For a second, Lemrin lost control of his sword, his hand driven away, and in that second, Jason kicked him in the chest and sent him back to the floor.
Jason raised his sword over Lemrin, but instead of striking, tripped and fell to his knee. He got up and turned around – Julia’s short sword was stuck under his left shoulder blade. Everything that followed happened too fast for Lemrin to even begin questioning how his wife got down here – he was still in one piece, as opposed to pieces, and for now, that was enough.
Julia ran up to Jason, and jump kicked him in the face, her body turning 360 degrees through the air. The self-proclaimed king flipped and fell face-down to the floor. Lemrin had seen his wife do this move when sparring with other kickboxers in her New Tokyo gym, but her opponents had helmets, protective pads, that sort of thing. He had never seen anyone go down so brutally quick.
She helped Lemrin up.
“You all right babe?” she asked, taking her long sword from Lemrin’s hand.
“Thanks,” he said. He suddenly realized that he was one lucky man.
“He’ll be all right,” said Julia, plucking out her short blade from Jason's back, “It didn’t hit any of the vitals.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“Look, will you get over it already? If you haven’t figured it out by now, love, there’s a damned good reason his boyfriend status had a big fat ‘ex’ for a prefix for the past four years!”
“Sorry,” he said. He wasn’t yet sure whether he meant it, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“You go first,” she said, pointing at the improvised rope leading to the opening in the cavern ceiling. Julia had apparently crafted the rope from bits of the throne room’s banners.
He grabbed the rope and started pulling himself up. By the time he climbed back up into the throne room, his muscles were burning with pain. The room was totaled. Columns lay in rubble, cracks ran across the destroyed mosaic floor, and the domed ceiling had collapsed, revealing Kibouian dark orange sky.
Julia climbed out of the hole in the floor. The ascent took her much less time than it did for Lemrin. She said, “Pull,” and gave him the rope. They lifted Jason, rope tied under his arms and around the waist, out of the cavern.
Lemrin opened the teleport cocoon’s door. The control panel’s lights blinked erratically, and the power gage showed that it had been running on a backup.
“This thing took a lot of damage,” he said, “Doesn’t look good.”
“Can you fix it?”
“No,” he said. Then, after thinking for a few seconds he added, “It may work once, but then it’s done for. One of us would have stay behind.”
He knew what that meant, of course. It’d take weeks to get to the closest teleport by local means of transportation, and by then, the Miyamoto would be far gone. And it wasn’t likely that an Imperial vessel would enter orbit until sent here to pick up the next batch of archivists.
“All right,” Julia said, “Help me with this.”
She took Jason’s legs and, with Lemrin’s help, dragged him into the teleport. Lemrin punched in the coordinates for their ship. He flipped the lever.
He decided the last three hours were one hell of a ride, and looked for a place to rest. The only piece of furniture relatively unscathed was the throne, Julia’s rope still tied to its base. Lemrin threw himself in.
“If we ought to make the best of our time,” said Julia, sitting down on his lap and wrapping her arm around him, “We ought to make some changes around here.” She waved at the debris around them.
“Yeah,” said Lemrin, “I mean, what kind of self-respecting kingdom calls itself ‘Khrul’?”
With 4,400 words this one's a bit on the longer side, but you don't have to read it all, of course.
If at anytime you feel bored - just let me know where (and why) you've stopped reading. Otherwise, feel free to rip it apart - grammar, structure, plot, possible cuts, tense or POV shifts (there aren't supposed to be any, but there's a big chance I've messed up in places), anything that you think can be improved on!
I'm also concerned whether I have a bit too much of info-dumping going on at one point, and whether the story would benefit if that bit would be cut out entirely. Also, if you feel that it becomes a too much tell-not-show sort of deal somewhere, let me know.
But if you decide to just leave a general comment, that's helpful too! Thanks a bunch in advance!
- - -
A Tale of Swords and Sorcery
4,400 words
- - -
The two curved swords clashed in a fountain of sparks. Lemrin struck again and again, every single time hitting nothing but his opponent’s blade. He thrust his sword forward, but the self-proclaimed King of Khrul side-stepped and elbowed him in the ear. Lemrin fell down on the cold metal of the ancient spaceship’s roof, rolled over, and got back up. He was about to die.
Three hours ago, Lemrin, still aboard the ISV Miyamoto, had been trying his best to avoid meeting any archivists in the ship's narrow corridors. They’ve all ready picked up everyone from the planet, and the new batch of loners hadn’t been teleported surface side yet, so the medium sized Imperial Space Vessel was getting rather crowded.
Lemrin never liked the folk. They all had their degrees, sure. Xenozoologist, astrophysicists, biologists, Imperial Officers, yeah, but who in their right mind would want to spend three years on some god forsaken rock surrounded by medieval-armor toting primitives?
In his experience, most of the men and women who volunteered for the archivist gig were either loners or misanthropes, or sometimes both. The thought about Imperial Officers made him realize that he could end up bumping into Jason. As fate would have it, it had to be their ship that got the assignment to pick up the archivists from Kibou when one them just so happened to have been his wife’s ex-boyfriend.
He passed the corridor, took a left, and retreated into his lab.
A single matchbox lay on Lemrin's workbench, exactly how he left it. Like magicians of old, he would stare at it for minutes at a time, trying to wish it into disappearing. So far he hadn’t achieved any better results than those who tried the trick before him, but Lemrin had something they didn’t. Namely, he spent weeks applying the basic principles of teleportation to his own brand of nanotech. The idea was to force the object to go into the initial stage of teleportation – complete atomic disassembly – and then to deny its return to original state.
If he could only make it work, then there would be no more need for anti-asteroid weaponry on space vessels, or for wearing down tunnel drills, or for spending so many man-hours in the mines. Nanotechnicians like him would simply wish obstacles out of existence.
“Hey, Julia,” said Lemrin to his wife as she entered the lab.
“Hi, babe.”
Julia’s usually spotless uniform had sweat marks on it, her traditional dual swords - the pride and joy of any Imperial Officer - were misaligned, and she had that same look in her eyes that she had when she explained to Lemrin that they will have her swords hanging above their bunk bed when they were sleeping, and that there was not a damned thing in hell that he could do about it.
“It’s Jason,” she said. It wasn’t exactly her talent for subtlety that made Lemrin fall in love with her. He expected her to say that name the second the airlock doors slid open, but he felt his fingers tightening their grip around the workbench’s edges nevertheless.
“What about him?”
“He never reported in,” she said, her hand resting on her longer sword, “All the other archivists are onboard and have been accounted for. I’m coming down to get him.”
“What?” as idiotic as it was, Lemrin couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“If he’s missing, don’t you think the Empire would send some sort of a search and rescue squad for him?” he went on, “Or maybe it’s nothing and he would be turning up any minute now?”
“No, it’s not nothing, Lemrin. They spent three years, three frigging years on that rock surrounded by people who still think that drilling holes in your skull is good treatment for headaches. Yesterday there wasn’t a single archivist a minute too late to hit the surface teleports. Not one but Jason.”
Lemrin’s fingers refused to let go of the bench.
“And,” she continued, “There would be no rescue squads. It’s not like archivists are valuable commodity, Lemrin.”
Lemrin knew his wife too well to realize that there wasn’t anything he could say or do to change her mind, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
“Look,” he started.
“No, you look,” she said, “I’m the Head of Security on this ship, and probably the only person aboard who can handle the job. But more than that, I am an Imperial Officer. And we don’t leave our own behind.”
She turned around and exited the lab. Lemrin stared at the door that closed behind her for what felt like ages. He finally released the workbench and lowered his eyes.
The matchbox was gone.
He pondered his situation for a while. What could he do – ask the captain to let them go together? He’d be laughed off the command deck. But he knew too well that Julia and Jason went way back before he even met her. They trained in the Academy together, for gods’ sakes. And he wasn’t about to let that comradeship, or whatever the military called it, get a fresh breath of air.
So he did the only thing he deemed sane. He waited for Julia to make the jump surface side, tossed the best of his nanotech in his sling bag, and then sneaked into the ship’s teleport chamber. He thought about making a normal, risk-free jump to the planet’s teleportation cocoon, but then decided against it. He’d be losing the element of surprise. He tracked down Julia’s jump coordinates, and adjusted them so that he’d exit his own jump someplace nearby.
He climbed into the cocoon, closed the door, and flipped the lever. There was a flash.
Open Coordinates Teleportation wasn’t for the faint of heart. Lemrin could have ended up with his legs in one part of the kingdom and his face planted half-way through an alien boulder in another, but he wouldn’t have let something like the risk of terrible accidental death stand in his way.
He bent over and threw up. Every single cell in his body felt like it had been turned to liquid fire and then frozen back solid.
Lemrin was standing on a narrow path, a sea, or perhaps an ocean, visible on the way down. What looked like a fishermen’s settlement stood on its shore. The grass that grew along the path still held morning dew on its blades. Looking up the hill, he could see a tower on the horizon.
He noted that he wasn’t being pursued – at least, not yet – and started walking towards the edifice.
The tower turned out to be nothing but a run-down windmill, but the entrance was blocked with a force field. Imperial tech. He knew that all archivists were supposed to have their own outposts on the planet, so he figured he wasn’t too far from his goal. Lemrin disabled it with a thoughtswitch override and showed himself in.
A busy-looking stone slab stood in the centre of the room. The tower’s other comforts included a bed and an improvised weights machine that took up all the little space that remained.
Lemrin never met his wife’s ex-boyfriend in person, but he remembered seeing an old shirtless photograph of him once, so the weights machine came as little surprise.
He turned his attention back to the slab and cleared the surface. Rags, plasma cartridges, microchips, and a dry half-eaten loaf of bread all fell to the floor to reveal a standard issue thoughtcube melted into the stone.
He touched the cube, and with a fizzling noise, it projected three holographic screens across the room. One was a map of the Kingdom of Khrul, the other showed a rotating model of a badly damaged derelict space ship, and the last one appeared to have been Jason’s personal log.
The log was encrypted, of course, but Lemrin could still figure out enough to know that Jason hadn’t signed in for months. All things considered, there was a good chance that Julia’s rescue attempt had been way overdue. Or perhaps not, he thought. His imagination was all too quick to draw a picture of her in Jason’s arms. He clenched his fists. Of course, if it hadn’t been Jason, it could have simply been somebody else, but hell, this was no time for philosophizing.
He threw another look at the central display. This ship’s image had been on all major networks two decades ago, back when ISV Leaky Bucket’s navigator miscalculated a jump to nearby system and, via a barrage of other improbable circumstances, discovered planet Kibou.
To everyone’s surprise, Kibou turned out to be inhabited by humans still living in a medieval level of technological advancement. The mystery was solved when Imperial Fleet Officers found records of a colonist ship disappearing near the planet’s coordinates nearly six centuries ago, years before the Solar Empire’s time.
After long debates between the Empire’s most critically acclaimed philosophers, anthropologists, and politicians, the government’s consensus was to establish a number of outposts on the planet where volunteers would spend thirty six month long shifts learning about the local society and keeping a lookout in case anything went terribly wrong.
As if the Kibouians would suddenly discover nuclear fission, he thought.
Otherwise, the Empire decided the people of Kibou had nothing to offer, and would probably be better left the hell alone in the long run anyway.
He left Jason’s outpost and headed down the path. By now he was sure that if he was to expect trouble, it wouldn’t be coming from Miyamoto’s crew. He hoped the captain reasoned that a jealousy stricken nanotechnican was far less important than any potential risk to a year’s worth of archivist’s data.
The village was submerged in early dawn’s fog. After traversing a maze of wooden shacks, pieces of boats, and hanging fishnets, Lemrin ended up at the seashore.
Three men were pushing a small lugger into the waves. The Kibouians were barefoot, their patched up clothing a murky green color, and, apart from their impending physiques, they could have easily passed for less privileged citizens in New Tokyo slums.
Lemrin stepped up and raised his hands in what he hoped was a friendly gesture. The only Imperials who knew Khrul’s language were either scholars, linguists, or archivists, so he had to make do with what he had.
“Hi,” he said.
The men stared. Lemrin reeked of vomit and sweat, so he hadn’t exactly expected them to fall to their knees and pronounce him their god – he represented a more advanced civilization the same way a roadkill represented the entire genome of ferrets.
He had enough nanotech with him half of Khrul into a pile of smoking planks and rubble, but that did little to dismiss the feeling that he was about to catch a face full of oar.
“Have you seen someone like me here recently?” he asked, opening up his weathered lab coat. He pointed to the Solar Empire emblem on his jumpsuit.
“You know, like a foreign person?”
One of the men reached out for Lemrin’s sleeve. He instinctively stepped back. The man then said a few words – least, Lemrin thought they were words – in his language. It sounded like a bad mix of old Earth’s English and pigeon.
“Wait,” Lemrin said, and raised his index finger to stress his point, “I’ll show you.”
He pulled out a pocket recompiler from his bag, the one that resembled a small marble. Lemrin thought of a simple algorithm and thoughtfed it into the device. The marble turned to liquid, pouring through his fingers and into the sand.
A mist started to form where the liquid met the beach. It rose, pulling in the surrounding sand into a vertical vortex. A human silhouette became more and more distinct at the epicenter. First the boots, then the legs and the short blade at her side, then her arms, longer sword in hand, then finally, the face.
“There,” said Lemrin, pointing at Julia’s full-height replica and feeling quite proud of his work, “Seen her around lately?”
The Kibouians faces reflected a look of absolute terror. They backed up, first slowly, then turned and took off at a speed that’d make a pro sprinter jealous. It wasn’t until they were many meters away that they started screaming.
“Wait, hold up!” Lemrin shouted. He thought that perhaps he overdid it with the swords. But no matter – if the mountain doesn’t come to the mad scientist, the mad scientist invents the matter disintegrator and cuts the mountain down.
A teleport cocoon should have been somewhere nearby. Closed Coordinates Teleportation was safe, precise, and usually didn’t involve vomiting all over yourself when you got there. Its jumps were also very easy to track.
Alien shouts filled the air. A crowd of Kibouians was coming at him from the village. Some were half-dressed, probably straight out of bed, but they were all unmistakably armed. They wielded rakes, scythes, clubs, and other implements of explicit bodily harm. Lemrin’s three fishermen acquaintances headed the mob.
The prospect of becoming bait for some local carnivore whale did not hold much appeal, so without any further ado, he made an arc around the lugger and ran. He ran and ran, his boots barely touching the sand. The mob followed. A harpoon whistled past his ear and stuck into the sand.
“I come in peace,” Lemrin shouted, increasing his pace. Soon, the beach came to a sudden end at the foot of a steep hill that fused into some sort of a rocky formation. Lemrin made a ninety degree turn and ran alongside. It looked like the Kibouians were finally falling behind. He dived into an opening in the rock and pressed against the cold stone. The mob rushed past.
Lemrin threw a recompiler in the air. The marble hit stone above him and exploded into blue luminescent fog that quickly spread along the cave's ceiling. He could now make out the metallic object standing near the end of the cavern.
He shook his head – the gods must have been on his side this morning – and climbed into the teleport cocoon. Lemrin brought up the coordinates for the previous jump on the control console and flipped the lever. There was a flash.
Way too easy, he thought, pushing the door open.
Lemrin stepped into the spacious room. The mosaic floor showed depictions of feasts, strange animals, and fighting men. Colored stones gave way to the silk banners that hung on the gold plated walls, and intricate carvings ran across the columns that supported the domed ceiling. But the center piece was, of course, the throne. A man sat in it, nodding to a robed figure’s indecipherable speech.
The man turned his head and looked at Lemrin. He dismissed his robed companion with a jerky gesture, and soon they were alone. His royal majesty’s bright clothes were riddled with arcane symbols and he wore a beard and long hair, but there could be no mistake. Lemrin knew that face.
“So,” Lemrin said, “A teleport in the throne room, huh? Not very subtle, if you ask me.”
The king stood up, two Imperial swords hanging at his side.
“Welcome to the Khrul's capital. You must be Lemrin, right?” said Jason.
“And you must be the resident prick. Where’s my wife?”
“We’ve had some, uh, disagreements,” said the former archivist, “I don’t think she appreciates my position here.” He snapped his fingers. The sound echoed through the room. “She’ll be joining us in a minute,” he added.
“I’m not an expert on you archivists,” said Lemrin, “But weren’t you supposed to record local history, not make it?”
“That’s what I thought when I got here, too. But after a year on this rock, I thought – why should others have all the fun? I still go back to my outpost by that fishermen’s village time to time for nostalgia’s sake, but my true place is here now,” Jason tapped his throne.
“Talking about which, where’s the real king?”
“I am the real king!” he said, “But if you’re talking about that poor old childless Kibouian *******, well, he’s in a much better place now.”
Lemrin raised an eyebrow.
“No, no, purely natural causes,” he quickly added, “I had nothing to do with it. However, being the youngest Grand Wizard in Khrul – and believe you me, that ain’t as hard as it sounds with a Mark II blaster at your side – I was the natural choice for the opening.”
Lemrin heard a door open, and Julia was brought in by two guards, one to each side of her. She did not seem hurt, but if looks could kill, then the rage in her eyes could take on all Kibouian armies combined, with the King of Khrul as the first man in line.
The guards were monsters of men, towering high above Julia in their full plate armor suits. Their helmets were visibly bent – not without his wife’s help, Lemrin thought – and both carried impressively sized maces at their sides. One of them was holding Julia’s two swords in his oversized hand.
“Lemrin!” she shouted, “What in the name of frozen hell are you doing here?”
“Just thought I’d drop by. Come on, you think I’d just sit there in my lab while you visit your past love here?” Lemrin nodded at Jason. “It doesn’t really look like he’s in a bad need of a rescue.”
“Well, neither am I. And…”
“Hey,” said Jason, “I’m still here, remember? Your ship won’t be in orbit forever, you know, and then it’s three more years of me against them. Or should I say, ‘us’ against them?”
Jason looked at Julia.
“There is no ‘us,’ Jason,” she said.
“Of course there is. Every king needs a queen, and I’ll be damned if I’m not king!”
“Look, you crazy *******,” said Lemrin, taking a step towards his wife, “How about you just let her go, we jump back to the ship, you go on running your little kingdom, and everybody lives happily ever after?”
Jason pulled out a handgun from under his colorful garments – doubtlessly the Mark II blaster he’d been so fond of – and pointed it at Lemrin’s head.
“How about… No?” he said, “The teleport’s right there, I’m not going to stop you. But she stays. And if you make another step and it’s not to get the hell out of here, it’ll be the last step you make.”
Lemrin took another step.
“I mean it, you freak!” Jason shouted.
To hell with this, Lemrin thought. He leaped for Julia, reaching into his bag mid-jump. At first he didn’t hear the blaster go off, but his subconsciousness still registered the click of Jason pulling the trigger. The energy bolt missed him by a matter of centimeters and tore into one of the throne room’s many columns, encompassing it into a cloud of flying stones.
Lemrin fell on his stomach. His bag flew open. Spherical containers of all sizes rolled across the mozaic floor in a bizarre fountain of nanotech. He turned to his back and saw Julia struggling with her armored escort.
He also saw Jason jump off his throne, blaster in hand, and take careful aim. Some rescue, he thought. He imagined the Imperial Academy, Jason with his hand around Julia’s waist. He imagined them naked, her leaning against his chest.
Something clicked. He remembered the matchbox on his workbench – and now he knew exactly what he felt back in the lab.
It hadn’t been anger.
It had been rage, rage strong enough to tear away at atoms, strong enough to set the very fabric of the universe aflame.
Jason lowered his weapon, watching in surprise as nanomachines turned to liquid and soaked into the floor. The room began to shake. Thoughtswitches went off one by one in Lemrin’s head, nanomachines eating away at the stone, erasing parts of it out of existence.
He got up and reached out for Julia. A crack had materialized between them, separating the room in two. A second ago there was an intricate piece of mozaic, and then it was absolutely nothing but a pitch black gap. Julia rotated her body, and one of her guards fell into the blackness. The second started to flee. Lemrin was standing on the edge, his hand hyper extended over the gap. Just a few centimeters, and he could pull her over, just a few centimeters more...
This time, he heard the shot. The sound was hollow, like a bowling ball hitting a block of cement, and another column exploded into dust. The room continued to shake. The third blaster shot, muffled by the ensuing chaos, was soon followed by Jason’s fading scream. Lemrin tripped, his fist intuitively closing around Julia’s long sword on the floor, and he fell into the darkness.
Lemrin fell and fell and fell.
The stop was both sudden and painful. Lemrin opened his eyes. He lay on the cold, polished surface of what was unmistakably the top of a very large space vessel. Not like any ship he has ever seen before, but the titanium plates bent by meteor showers and the antenna spikes reaching up to the cavern’s ceiling left no room for doubt. It was definitely a space ship. And it hadn’t been one of the Empire’s.
A ray of light illuminated the cave. Lemrin first moved his left leg, then his right. Then his hands, Julia’s sword still firm in his grasp. He somehow managed not to break any bones on the impact.
On the far side of the ship, a figure scooped itself up from the floor. Jason stood by an antenna spike, the once-bright fabric of his clothes now covered in dust. He lost his Mark II blaster and half a sleeve in the fall, but that did little to negate the fact that he had adopted a standard Imperial fighting stance, his long blade in front of him.
There could be only one way this could end. Lemrin unsheathed Julia’s sword.
Jason took a step towards him, both hands on his sword. There was something feline about his features now. He was only a few meters away.
From what Lemrin could remember, Imperial Officers had to prove their swords skills through countless sparring fights to graduate the Academy, and swordsmanship wasn’t exactly on Lemrin's Microcomputing curriculum.
Lemrin calculated his chances of success. Unfortunately for him, he was good at mathematics.
“Wait!” Lemrin shouted.
He held out his left palm, as if asking Jason to stop, and struck.
The two curved swords clashed in a fountain of sparks. Lemrin struck again and again, every single time hitting nothing but his opponent’s blade. He thrust his sword forward, but the King of Khrul side-stepped and elbowed him in the ear. Lemrin fell down on the cold metal of the ancient spaceship’s roof, rolled over, and got back up. He was about to die.
Lemrin made a slashing movement, but Jason jumped out of the way, the arc of nanosharp carbide cutting nothing but air. And then, Jason attacked. He made a false pass, then struck at Lemrin’s blade. For a second, Lemrin lost control of his sword, his hand driven away, and in that second, Jason kicked him in the chest and sent him back to the floor.
Jason raised his sword over Lemrin, but instead of striking, tripped and fell to his knee. He got up and turned around – Julia’s short sword was stuck under his left shoulder blade. Everything that followed happened too fast for Lemrin to even begin questioning how his wife got down here – he was still in one piece, as opposed to pieces, and for now, that was enough.
Julia ran up to Jason, and jump kicked him in the face, her body turning 360 degrees through the air. The self-proclaimed king flipped and fell face-down to the floor. Lemrin had seen his wife do this move when sparring with other kickboxers in her New Tokyo gym, but her opponents had helmets, protective pads, that sort of thing. He had never seen anyone go down so brutally quick.
She helped Lemrin up.
“You all right babe?” she asked, taking her long sword from Lemrin’s hand.
“Thanks,” he said. He suddenly realized that he was one lucky man.
“He’ll be all right,” said Julia, plucking out her short blade from Jason's back, “It didn’t hit any of the vitals.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“Look, will you get over it already? If you haven’t figured it out by now, love, there’s a damned good reason his boyfriend status had a big fat ‘ex’ for a prefix for the past four years!”
“Sorry,” he said. He wasn’t yet sure whether he meant it, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“You go first,” she said, pointing at the improvised rope leading to the opening in the cavern ceiling. Julia had apparently crafted the rope from bits of the throne room’s banners.
He grabbed the rope and started pulling himself up. By the time he climbed back up into the throne room, his muscles were burning with pain. The room was totaled. Columns lay in rubble, cracks ran across the destroyed mosaic floor, and the domed ceiling had collapsed, revealing Kibouian dark orange sky.
Julia climbed out of the hole in the floor. The ascent took her much less time than it did for Lemrin. She said, “Pull,” and gave him the rope. They lifted Jason, rope tied under his arms and around the waist, out of the cavern.
Lemrin opened the teleport cocoon’s door. The control panel’s lights blinked erratically, and the power gage showed that it had been running on a backup.
“This thing took a lot of damage,” he said, “Doesn’t look good.”
“Can you fix it?”
“No,” he said. Then, after thinking for a few seconds he added, “It may work once, but then it’s done for. One of us would have stay behind.”
He knew what that meant, of course. It’d take weeks to get to the closest teleport by local means of transportation, and by then, the Miyamoto would be far gone. And it wasn’t likely that an Imperial vessel would enter orbit until sent here to pick up the next batch of archivists.
“All right,” Julia said, “Help me with this.”
She took Jason’s legs and, with Lemrin’s help, dragged him into the teleport. Lemrin punched in the coordinates for their ship. He flipped the lever.
He decided the last three hours were one hell of a ride, and looked for a place to rest. The only piece of furniture relatively unscathed was the throne, Julia’s rope still tied to its base. Lemrin threw himself in.
“If we ought to make the best of our time,” said Julia, sitting down on his lap and wrapping her arm around him, “We ought to make some changes around here.” She waved at the debris around them.
“Yeah,” said Lemrin, “I mean, what kind of self-respecting kingdom calls itself ‘Khrul’?”
幻術
I've also realized that the last line had "said Jason" instead of "said Lemrin," haha. At one time (before posting this here) I had Lemrin's name constantly change either to Lermin or Merlin. 