Before The Storm
Chapter Five
The surface of the planet was nothing but dead rock and mausoleums as far as the eye could see, and if Helen was to be believed, there wasn’t another living soul basically within ten minutes flight in any direction. The defenses were all automated, and many of them were basically antiques at this point so Sketch wasn’t especially worried about them, although there was always a chance that a patrol could come swooping by or that they could trip some alarm he wasn’t perfect at dealing with. There wasn’t even much in the way of weather on the planet either, simply because the oxygen was produced and balanced by machines, and there wasn’t much in the way of things to consume that oxygen.
It was a tombworld in nearly every sense of the word.
Sketch had expected the buildings to be closer together, but it was a decent walk from the landing spot past the Brookian structure over towards the tombs of human royalty. They hadn’t been originally located on Jamolti, but when the Starless Dominion had taken over, they’d insisted that the remains of the human royal familes be kept on the Dominion’s primary tombworld like all other royalists in fiefdoms under their control. A large structure had been built and everything had been interred from their original home on Earth and relocated to Jamolti, something the human royals had been told was a great honor, although in his reading up on the Dominion, he’d been able to recognize their real reason for doing so.
With all the deceased royalty of the Dominion’s subjects on one distant tombworld in the middle of nowhere, there were less reminders of times when all these species had been under their own guidance and not under the iron fist of the Starless Dominion. Royals were contained to their palaces. The currency was that of the Dominion. Anything to remind subjects of the times before the Dominion held control was constantly being minimized and swept under the proverbial rug. Beneath the Dominion’s iron fist, royalty was like a caged animal in a zoo, something the people had to think to go and look at, instead of it being constantly around them.
And if ever the royalty got to be more trouble than they were worth, it also made it much easier to remove them as well, lessons the humans had learned the hard way.
Sketch found himself looking at the building more closely as they approached it, and it had clearly been built by the Dominion itself with only a smattering of care towards what the humans whose remains were interred in would think of it. There were handfuls of pieces with human iconography scattered around the place, but it was all obfuscated beneath layer after layer of Dominion stamping, revealing a complete lack of understanding of who and what humans were. Or, more likely, the Dominion just didn’t give a shit. The imagery was strange—people with antique musical instruments and microphones, performances, thralls of people in worship to the performers. There also seemed to be one figure who recurred in multiple different mosaics across the surface of the building, a strange heavyset man in a white suit that seemed to be adorned with jewels, a large coif of onyx black hair atop of his head, clinging to a microphone as legions of adoring humans heaped praise upon him, droplets of sweat flying from him in every direction.
Parts of the building had become slightly run down, dings and dents peppering the outside of the structure, and the dust that had accumulated on the path leading up to it was thick. Nobody had been near the human mausoleum in quite some time, which made Sketch feel a little bit more relaxed about their whole endeavor, because the last thing he needed was some nosy guard coming across them. It seemed, however, like the Dominion liked to keep humanity out of sight and out of mind.
“I guess I should’ve been here more often when I was still considered royalty,” Serena sighed. “No one’s been in this place for far, far too long.”
“In that you humans and we Y’bari are alike—we have no use for our dead either,” Aliara said.
“Well, we’ve got some use for them today,” Sketch said as his eyes combed over the area around the outskirts of the building, looking for some sort of automated defenses that they might have missed, but finding none. “Assuming you’re right about this.”
“I’m right more often than not,” Serena said proudly.
“I’ve been looking through the royal archives and I don’t see anything about Fury Rose listed in there, Aliara,” Sketch said. “Hell, I didn’t even see her name mentioned all that much.”
“It wouldn’t be,” she said as they approached the front door of the mausoleum. “We had to keep most traces of The Calm hidden from the main records in case the Dominion obtained a copy of our archives, which is why there’s a severe decline in us talking about them internally after Dominion took over. There’s lots of things that are still in there, but they’re encoded, and I’ll teach you the code. We grew very paranoid about being kept so close to the Dominion after humanity’s submission. The only reason I even know about this particular internment is because of the stories your friend Lord Ardbard told me growing up. He was friends with Fury Rose, said while she could be unpredictable, she was also remarkably insightful.”
“Unpredictable,” Sketch laughed, examining the door as he shook his head. “That’s certainly one word for it. She often claimed to hear voices no one else did. Keep in mind, she was able to change the minds of hundreds of thousands of people, but even many in The Calm itself were never entirely comfortable around her. The tools of our trade, the abilities we wielded as Calm... they came incredibly easy to Rose. Too easy if the other Furies were to be believed. They were worried that she held too much power, and that it had taken a toll on her mind. I sort of thought it sounded like superstition, especially since she’d only just become a Fury when I joined up in The Calm. People tend to gossip in any workplace, you know?”
“But... hearing voices?”
“Could’ve just been eccentricities,” he said hopefully as they came to stand directly in front of the door, his hands reaching out to smooth against it. “So how do we get in?”
“We’ve got two options,” Serena sighed. “We can break in and hope the alarm doesn’t go off, or we can use my access code, which will guarantee the door will open without an alarm, unless my ID code has been tagged, in which case they’ll definitely know I’m alive, and then we’ll be in an entirely different kind of mess.”
“What are the odds your ID code has been tagged to send an alert?” Sketch asked before turning to Aliara. “Is that the kind of thing the Y’bari would do?”
Aliara looked amused by that suggestion, tilting her head almost scoldingly. “Y’bari troopers don’t do anything that we aren’t directly ordered to. As dangerous as they may have seemed before their deposal, I don’t think the Dominion gave the human royals a second thought after they were slaughtered,” the ex-Y’bari soldier said. “My vote is for using her code.”
“That’s sort of how I feel,” Serena said, approaching the terminal. “I think my code’s still going to be good, and I’m not all that concerned about what happens when the door opens. Even if an alarm goes off, it’s not going to be responded to very quickly. There isn’t anybody all that nearby on world, and if some kind of notice is sent to the Dominion, they’re several hours away, at the very least. We can go and have ourselves a looting before anyone shows up, I’m sure of it.”
“Fine,” Sketch said, pulling his cloak a bit closer around him reflexively. He’d gotten out of the habit of trusting other people, so this all still sat a little uncomfortably with him, but it seemed like both Serena and Aliara were intent on being in his life for the long haul, so it would be best to just accept them as allies and putting faith in them.
He just needed to remember how to actually do that.
Serena stepped right up to a scanner and placed her palms flat on ID readers, her eyes looking straight forward as an automated system scanned her. “State access code.”
“O’Quincy, White Dwarf, Zulu Baker Echo Echo three three seven.”
“Access granted,” the door replied drearily, as the two sheets of massive metal slid open to allow them access into the tomb. “You have... three hours... of access before doors will close. Do not exceed time allotted or you will be locked inside until an attendant can come and verify your identity, at which point you will be released. Thank you.”
Sketch tapped the syslink on his neck to open a channel to Helen. “Helen, set a timer for two hours. At the end of it, give us a call and tell us to get our asses out of here. I don’t even want to be here that long, but who knows how long it’ll take us to find what we need and haul ass.”
“You got it, boss. Stay safe.”
“Only thing I know how to do well. Sketch out.”
The path inside the building wasn’t covered with as much dust as Sketch had expected it to be, but he could see there were tiny little air vents blowing across the ground, recirculating the atmosphere, and keeping anything from settling on the floors. That only applied to the floors, though, and all the sarcophagi near the entrance had a caked on layer of grime atop of them. There were also cobwebs linked among most of the ceilings, although he found himself wondering what spiders could possibly feast on in here.
The first few caskets upon entry were some of the oldest and most well-known members of the human royalty lineages, Sketch assumed, but he’d never been much of a royalist, so he didn’t pay any of it much mind. The names might have held reverence to many other humans, but not to him.
“What we’re looking for will be on the bottom floor,” Serena told them. “Down among the people who nobody ever came to visit.”
“Why down there? I would think the bowels would be the areas that got searched the most,” Sketch said.
“You’re thinking like a smuggler, love, and not like a member of a noble house,” Serena said with a soft laugh. “The basement is where we tend to put all the people we don’t like to think about but can’t afford to formally get rid of. It’ll look a little showy, but that’s just because we had to jam our junk somewhere, and that was it.”
He found it odd, walking through stacks of bodies within cases, so much gaudy decoration on the outsides of boxes that only held bones and dust at this point. The amount of wealth dedicated to the honoring of the dead had always confused Sketch. The dead were dead. They had no need for such things nor could they appreciate them. He very much wanted to steal some of the decoration layered on top of the boxes, but felt that Serena would’ve taken to that rather poorly. After all, she was surely related to some of the people buried around them.
The passageways were narrow, without much room to maneuver, so they had to walk one-by-one through the hallways, something which only made him even more nervous. Sure, the defensive choke points would prevent anyone from coming in after them, but it would also seriously impede their ability to escape under pressure. He just hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary. But his old soldier instincts had never truly left him, even as atrophied as they were.
As the three of them descended down the stairs, Sketch noted that there was no chance anyone had used them in at least a decade. The whole area reminded him of old ghost stories soldiers he’d served with had often told. Military men were, strangely, often superstitious by nature, and the idea of graverobbing would’ve put some of his old cohorts on edge, but Sketch had never bought into any of that. The newly dead and the long since dead differed in only one real way—time. Sketch had other reasons to be cautious around graveyards.
It was much more about who was protecting the dead than the dead themselves.
They moved not one or two levels down, but nearly ten flights of stairs, the last level being only a short half-level walk into a room that was lined with suits of battle armor on either side, like terracotta soldiers of old, an entire squadron of dead warriors protecting the corpses of a handful of key bodies, including the first true Terran Queen, Aliyah.
“Aliyah’s tomb is buried deep enough that nobody ever comes down here, which Lord Arbard said they used to hide Fury Rose’s remains. Fury Rose was badly injured, fleeing from the Dominion’s attempts to eradicate all of The Calm, and despite Lord Arbard’s attempts to tend to her wounds, she succumbed to them and died,” Serena said. “He told me that tale multiple times when I was growing up, that the Dominion hadn’t realized he’d spirited her away from the Y’bari sent to kill her, so that she could actually rest in peace somewhere.”
“Until we came along to dig her up and ransack her body,” Sketch grumbled, examining one of the suits of power armor, considering if there might be any use for having one of them on the ship, but ultimately deciding against it, knowing it would generate more questions than he would’ve liked.
“No, we’re here to get her thingamabob for you,” Serena replied. “We’re not graverobbers.”
“In the most literal sense of the word, we are,” Aliara said with a smirk.
“I don’t think she’ll mind,” Serena said, as she brought them around the backside of a large ornate casket. Once standing behind it, they could see some details on the back of the casket that hadn’t been visible on the front, notably that there was an inset tray a couple of feet deep right at the base of it. There were latches on either side of it, which she released. “Nobody’s squeamish about dead bodies, are they? Didn’t think so.”
With Sketch’s help, she pulled out the tray, revealing that there were two sets of bones interred in the casket, one of which was Aliyah’s, the other of which, far less desiccated, was that of Fury Rose, some of her cloth still in shreds atop of her body, decades worth of decomposition having stripped the flesh from her bones. Clenched in her hands, however, was the important relic, the reason they were here in the first place—the Ashaka.
Each member of the Calm had their own personal Ashaka, a complex sphere full of science and mysticism. They spent an entire month of their training crafting not one, but two such devices. The parts were generally easy to obtain, or at least they had been in their time, but since the Dominion had taken over, a few of the specific gemstones inside had fallen under a small list of things that the Dominion considered “forbidden.” If it had just been the basic innards, Sketch could’ve built a new Ashaka, but the status of the gems made them near impossible to obtain. Even his fence, who was typically game for anything, said they were “too hot to handle.”
The inside of each Ashaka was a maze of crystal, gears, gems, diodes and wires, so complex that anyone unfamiliar with the structure wouldn’t even know what the importance of any individual piece would be. The Ashaka looked like it was relatively intact, although Sketch was certain the energy source in it was completely drained, and would need to be recharged if not replaced. The exteriors were built out of very durable metal, so that they could endure all sorts of abuse and problems.
Some members of The Calm decorated their Ashakas, but others liked to keep them purely utilitarian, as plain on the outside as possible. Fury Rose had adorned the exterior with floral patterns all over it, some etched into the base surface, some painted on with gold leaf and some actually layered on the exterior in relief. Sketch wondered if that impacted the Ashaka itself, but he remembered hearing that it shouldn’t have any real influence on the focusing the Ashaka did.
Sketch sighed, closing his eyes for just a fraction of a moment, as if to remind himself that he didn’t believe in ghosts or curses.
He was the least certain he’d ever been in that belief in the split second before his fingers touched Fury Rose’s Ashaka.
When he did...
...nothing happened.
He exhaled the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding the whole time.
The ball was inert, which he attributed to it needing new fuel cells, and the Fury’s skeletal fingers let go of it with a few cracks and creaks. He glanced around the room, looking back at Serena and Aliara. “Well, if it is cursed, it didn’t hit me right up front,” he said, a nervous laugh from his lips.
“I don’t feel like the need to fuck you blind easing off,” Serena replied with a frown. “Is it broken?”
“It’s not powered,” Sketch said. “And it’s not attuned to me yet. So let’s go back to The Praeteritus and get off this planet.”
The trio fled from the mausoleum quickly and headed back to the ship, seeing no one approaching them, no signs of patrol cruisers or any other small craft zipping towards them. To ensure they didn’t draw too much attention to themselves, however, they also made a quick detour over to the Brookian building, placing a box of ashes atop one of their stairs. The box only contained wood ashes, but it was unlikely that any Brookian would come by and complain any time soon. Their race was in what might be its final generations, but was doing its best to try and repopulate some.
As The Praeteritus lifted off of Jamolti, Sketch let himself have a brief sigh of relief. “So hopefully within a few hours, I should have this fixed and functional again, and then I can start getting myself aligned with it.”
The ship cut through the atmosphere and back into the black, setting a path for a nearby settlement world called Veline, not much more than an intergalactic truck stop of a planet, but it would give them time to get used to the new way they saw each other once he got the Ashaka back to functional. He was hoping there wasn’t some sort of larger problem he’d missed, but it felt good, being so close to a working solution, one that would allow him free passage in all sorts of other places he’d been unable to walk into for half a decade now. Like bars. God how he missed bars.
“So how long before you’re going to have it up and running again?” Serena asked him. Over the week and change they’d spent together, he’d found her relentlessly curious about everything, something he respected even if he occasionally found it rather vexing.
“Best guess? I probably only need a couple of hours, but I don’t know what it’s going to be like getting connected to it, for me or for you two,” he said as he brought the ship into an orbit around the planet. “If you two want to take a shuttle down to the surface for a few hours while I’m working it out, I wouldn’t blame you.”
Aliara shook her head. “Negative, captain,” she smiled. “We’re here, so we’ll just keep ourselves busy while you work on it. And once it’s up and safe again, we’ll all go together and see the city as a trio. That seems only fair, don’t you think?”
He nodded. “Alright, then I’d better get to work. Princess, you have the con.”
“The what now?” Serena asked him with a confused look.
“Make sure the ship doesn’t crash into anything,” he said, tossing the Ashaka up and down in one hand as he headed off the bridge and down the hall towards his little workshop. He’d thought about swinging by his quarters first and grabbing the fragments of his own Ashaka, but they were in such an awful state, he didn’t see the point in trying to reuse them unless absolutely necessary.
The workshop had originally been a craft room dedicated towards pottery, but he’d completely reworked it, redirecting everything towards metalcraft. He’d actually built much of a new Ashaka, but without the various gemstones contained within Fury Rose’s, the Ashaka didn’t do anything.
At first, he’d been considering simply taking the gemstones out of Rose’s Ashaka and putting them into the shell of a new one he’d built for himself, but he’d decided against that, simply because some of The Calm had boobytrapped their Ashakas to prevent tampering. He would be able to tell better once he was linked up with it, after he’d replaced the power cell.
In this, at least, he had a little bit of an advantage. Ashakas generally followed one of four major design approaches, one for each path—The Calm, The Rage, The Warmth and The Fear. About two-thirds of Ashakas were built to lean towards The Calm first and foremost, a result of wanting to use that particular path the most.
Sketch, on the other hand, had gone a different path. When he’d been Spark Walker, he’d known that The Calm was the easiest path to lean into, and therefore it would always be relatively easy to access. That meant he’d wanted to choose a different path for his Ashaka to lean into, one that he found more difficult to summon up easily, which meant his Ashakas had been attuned towards The Rage. He’d found The Warmth had been an easy enough path to lean into, and as a former soldier-of-fortune, he knew The Fear was always just around the corner, but the idea of letting anger get the best of him was something almost alien to Sketch’s very nature, so he’d leaned into doing things the hard way.
As he opened the bottom of Fury Rose’s Ashaka where the fuel cells would be inserted, he saw that she too had gone a different path, and that her Ashaka was aligned with the path of The Warmth, something he found a little unusual. The Warmth was the least commonly chosen path for aligning Ashakas, simply because the element of connecting to other people generally came easily for members of The Calm. That was their lot in life—to reach out a hand in good faith—so many saw the path of The Warmth as a tool that was always used externally, to help people overcome deep seeded prejudices to see the true person they were sitting across from.
The cells popped out of the bottom of it, two squat cylindrical tubes a hollow shade of gray, when they should’ve been glowing with a diffuse purple glow. He took a couple of minutes to check the structures of them, making sure they hadn’t been damaged or depleted other than through natural dissipation, and was pleased to find they didn’t have anything wrong with them. They were also of the same size and shape of the replacement fuel cells he’d built over the years, so it turned out the wait would be even less long than he’d anticipated. He’d had new fuel cells charged and waiting for the day when he’d found gems for his newly constructed Ashakas, but now he could just pop them into Fury Rose’s and begin the linking process.
He headed over to the charge box, pulled out a pair of charged cells and slotted them into Rose’s Ashaka before closing the cover, hearing the little sphere start to hum to life once more before falling silent again. The hum only happened during the device’s starting up or shutting down.
Sketch placed his hands on either side of the Ashaka, cradling it between his fingers and palms as he folded his legs beneath him, starting to meditate in the ritual needed to bring this Ashaka from its original encoding over to his mental wavelengths.
Reclaiming an Ashaka was extremely uncommon, but when he’d been a Spark, he’d asked to learn the ritual for it, in case he was ever lost apart from his Ashakas and needed to borrow someone’s spare. His instructor, Fury Mubatu, had thought it a strange request, but had learned to indulge his student’s nature for esoteric learning.
He began flowing his emotions from his left hand to his right, directing them through Ashaka, which chirped in recognition of a different set of wavelengths than it was accustomed to. The metal sphere started to warm within his hands, something he’d expected, although the rate at which it went from ‘a little warm’ to ‘almost too hot to handle’ surprised even him.
His eyes opened, and he could tell from his reflection in the metal door that his eyes were glowing with a frightening light, something that wasn’t unusual for the process but still looked unnatural even to his own gaze. That wasn’t what concerned him.
What concerned him was that he was floating a good foot above the ground.
That had never happened before.
The ritual completed with a sudden surge of electricity up both of his arms, as his eyes closed shut and he felt the weight of the floor pressing up against the underside of his legs once more, clearly having fallen out of the air and back onto the floor.
He unfolded his legs from beneath him and moved to stand a little awkwardly, using his left hand to help steady him as he rose up, the Ashaka in his right hand, the tiny hum ticking off before settling like actual weight against his fingertips.
The change inside of his head was immediate. He felt more like himself than he had in years, a sense of immense clarity overwhelming him, like a part of him had been missing but that he hadn’t realized that until had been returned, and now that it had, he could breathe without an immense pressure on his chest, easy and relieved breaths.
“It looks like it worked,” Helen said to him, her disembodied voice ringing through the air. “You aren’t emanating signals anymore, and your vitals almost make you seem five to ten years younger. Stronger heartbeat, increased blood circulation, increased mental acuity... I imagine you’re feeling quite the rush, boss.”
She was right, he had to admit. The changes weren’t just mental, they were physical as well. His body moved with a sense of nimbleness he had thought long since lost. After his insanely long deep freeze, he’d assumed the degraded reflexes and strength had just been a side effect of that, and not a side effect of not having an Ashaka to focus his mental energies.
“I really am, Helen,” he said. He felt steady enough now that he wanted to try something, planting his left hand atop of a table before vaulting his body upwards, balancing himself feet over head, all precariously stabilized atop one arm, his other arm still holding the Ashaka. “Gods, I thought these days were long since behind me.”
C’mon, let’s not get cocky, a foreign voice said from somewhere inside of his skull.
He was heavily startled but had enough clarity of mind to push back and land on his feet before glancing around the room a bit. “Helen, where did that voice come from?” he said as he moved over to his worktable, tossing the Ashaka from his right hand to his left before picking up a blaster with his right, feeling slightly better with the pistol at the ready.
“Where did what voice come from, Captain? I detected nothing.”
She can’t hear me. Only you can.
He spun around, glancing behind him, his eyes widening a little bit. “You had to have heard that, Helen.”
“Captain, I regret to inform you... there is nothing to hear. Are you experiencing hallucinations?”
I’m not a hallucination.
“That’s just what a hallucination would say,” Sketch thought but didn’t vocalize.
You’ve grown a bit since I last saw you.
“I... I’ve what now?” he thought.
Reports were that you were lost on the frontier on a mission, well before the Dominion invaded. Keeping a low profile, were you?
Sketch was trying to remember whose voice it was it felt like was rebounding inside of his skull until suddenly the truth became undeniable.
“Rose?”