This is an open project: you can get involved by posting line-comments and suggesting edits on the google doc, or by emailing peter@peterandjessica.com with overall comments.
Olivia Hasda lay on her side, waiting for her roommate to fall asleep. The vinyl mesh of her cot felt cold and hard and she had to support her head with one arm, but the discomfort only made her adventure more real.
Black obsidian walls enveloped her, speckled with green and orange microhalogens that blinked furiously as information flowed through the arteries of the battlestation. Her room was positioned on the rim of the disc-shaped station. It wasn’t as beautiful as the sweeping white curves and gardens of the temple, but there was a feeling of raw power here and an alien character unlike anything she had experienced.
She closed her eyes and visualized the station hurtling in orbit around Palles at unthinkable speed. It was hard not to feel a little giddy.
In that moment, she didn’t want to carry out her mission; she didn’t want to sabotage the station. But deep down, she knew she must. If she wanted to please Elyon and free her people, she would need to destroy this living, breathing work of art.
Her roommate, Luz Archer, began breathing heavily.
Olivia felt a pit in her stomach as she tip-toed around her sleeping roommate. Luz was her partner, but there was something she had to do that Luz wouldn’t understand, something even more important than their sabotage mission.
Before she had left for the battlestation, Elyon had shown her a vision of thousands of Sardonians defecting from their god, Jupar, and streaming into Elyon’s temple on Palles. She knew he meant for her to have a role in this mass-defection, so what better place to start than here on the Sardonian battlestation. And she knew just who the first Sardonian convert would be: Zaphir, son of Supalvi, the Sardonian who had recruited her for military service.
Olivia crept to the door and winced when it hissed open automatically. But Luz didn’t stir, so she tiptoed into the hall and let the door shut behind her.
Deep in a lucid dream, Luz knelt on the outer framing of the battlestation shield. She lunged for Olivia, but her gloved fingers clawed futilely as Olivia screamed and fell, shrinking into the starry void. Guilt hit her in the chest with a foreign intensity. She had lost soldiers, but Olivia was no soldier. She was a priestess and a young one at that; Luz couldn’t help but feel responsible.
The airlock behind her hissed shut -- or was it the door to their room? The dream-world slowly morphed into the real world and Luz blinked a bleary eye in the direction of Olivia’s cot: it was empty.
Luz jerked into a sitting position. Sar! That girl would blow their cover -- did she have no idea how important this mission was?
Luz threw on her tactical vest and slung a rifle on her back. She looked at the weapons safe and hesitated. She hadn’t been trained with the blackball yet and she probably wouldn’t need the extra firepower. But the image of Olivia falling into space -- and the guilt in her chest -- still lingered, so she reached her palm out to the safe’s biometric scan.
Olivia took a ramp descending into the strips -- a large corridor with high-speed traction-gridded strips moving in both directions. The station had entered the sleep phase of its sleep/wake cycle, so she was surprised to see three Sardonians awake and moving on the strips. Sardonians were bipedal, with barrel-chests and oily green skin -- and they were notoriously obsessed with law. She could only hope that their obsession didn’t extend to the minor details of curfews for new recruits. And anyways, even if they did care, these Sardonians wouldn’t even know that she was a new recruit.
Olivia carefully navigated the slower strips and almost lost her balance making the transition to the fast strips. She had only used strips once before -- back on Palles, when a temple errand had brought her to the king’s palace. She grabbed the hand-rail to steady herself and, after recovering, struck a confident pose with her arm on the rail and her hair swept back by the rushing air.
When she entered quadrant six, the ceiling above the strips sloped up, further and further, until it broke away entirely, revealing what lay directly above her, at the heart of the station’s disc. It was a massive statue of an impossibly muscular Sardonian in a hard-edged cubist style: Jupar. The god’s eyes were blazing with a brilliant gold light, its obsidian features accentuated by gold filigree of inlaid octagons and intricate, sharp-angled patterns. The statue rotated slowly, as if casting a watchful gaze on Olivia.
Olivia looked away and quickened her step. She knew that technically the statue was stationary and that it was the rest of the station that was rotating, but the effect was still disconcerting.
Olivia had no desire for Jupar to know her true mission. Not that the god himself would be on the station -- she imagined he wouldn’t stray far from Sardonia -- but at least one of his demons would be here.
As she walked quickly along the strips, she became aware of the thoughts of a Sardonian behind her, focused in her direction. Without turning, she closed her eyes, relying on her mastery of telepathy to see the thought-world surrounding her. In disbelief, she saw his intimate knowledge of the curfews… and his suspicion that she was a new recruit. His thoughts shifted down to the holo display on his wrist as he directed its camera at her.
Olivia jumped to the slower strips, holding out her arms to keep her balance, then jumped off at the next exit and ducked behind the exit wall. Maybe she could lose him while still heading towards Zaphir at exit 6.31.
She was standing on an octagonal platform with stairs leading up to another landing. More stairs criss-crossed to an all-glass landing above her. Above the glass -- and through another landing -- she saw the object of the ascending stairs: the rotating inner core of the station with Jupar and his altars.
Olivia reached out with her mind toward the strips. The Sardonian neared the exit -- and was no longer just mildly curious. His mind was bent on her, filled with a deep-seated need to seize her and submit her to the justice system to pay for violating a rule, to make the world right again. She hadn’t even been on the station for five hours and already she was sick of the Sardonian mentality.
Olivia started up the stairs, two at a time.
At the final landing, Olivia leaned heavily against the railing. The cold railing drawing the heat out of her palms as she sucked air, catching her breath. The gravity was about a third of what it had been down below, but she didn’t have time to enjoy it.
Adamant, justice-seeking thoughts spilled into her consciousness, growing stronger as her pursuer ascended each flight of steps. Olivia placed her slender thumb over an elevator panel, hoping Palleans were allowed into the inner core of the station -- the temple area.
She gritted her teeth at the thought of worshippers coming up here to offer sacrifices to Jupar, but the feeling dissipated as she marvelled at the engineering above her: millions of kilos of obsidian, reinforced by titanium bars, spun frictionlessly, controlled by ten thousand electromagnets working together to compensate for subtle shifts in mass.
The elevator door hissed open, so Olivia entered and braced herself against the back -- but she wasn’t prepared for the sudden rush of acceleration and the ensuring weightlessness. Her stomach turned and she fought the urge to vomit all over the elevator’s spartan metal interior.
The ceiling of the elevator opened, with Jupar filling the view. At least he wasn’t looking at her anymore. Olivia realized that the ceiling was a door and she pulled herself down to a squatting position before jumping with both feet. She flew up through the ceiling and out into the temple area -- perpendicular to everything.
The sharp edge of an altar cut into Olivia’s hand as she jerked her body to a stop. She pulled herself closer to it and made sure she wasn’t bleeding before pushing off again, this time headed back to a row of magboots outside the elevator door.
The acrid taste of smoke agitated the back of her mouth and a subtle haze hung in the air. The inner core was far larger than any other space on the station. It was dominated by the enthroned statue of Jupar, whose head nearly scraped the ceiling. The ceiling and floor were circular -- the sides of the station’s disc.
Olivia put on a pair of magboots and walked toward the ring of altars. There weren’t many places to hide and she had to place her feet carefully to avoid listing too far to one side in the zero-gravity.
As she approached an altar, she noticed angular-looking flames etched into the obsidian. Touching this would probably ignite a gas or liquid emitted from a tiny lattice of holes on the inside of the stone. Copper spears that looked suspiciously like electromagnets curved out on all sides of the altar, mirrored by curving spears above the altar. Olivia wondered if they injected iron filings into the sacrifices to keep them from floating away.
She could feel the thoughts of her pursuer approaching. Olivia hurried around the edge of the circle, mag-boots clicking against the steel floor as they engaged and disengaged, and ducked into the next elevator, which she took down to the landing below.
After the jerk and lurch of returning gravity, she emerged from the elevator and decided to try the first door on this upper level instead of venturing back down to the strips.
The smell of sweaty fur registered too late as the door swished shut behind her.
Even before her eyes adjusted to the dim red lights, she sensed movement all around her. She reached out with her mind and sensed that the minds of the creatures around her were filled with low-level instincts, not higher-order thought. This, together with the increased humidity and grated flooring, indicated she was in a livestock holding tank.
In the back of the room an invisible shadow, whose thoughts operated in a realm undetectable by telepathy, manipulated a series of key pins, unlocking a particularly large cage.
Olivia walked slowly, squinting to see if the path in front of her was clear. To her left, there was slithering and crunching. To her right, the rattling of a cage and a strangled cry that could belong to a small mammal or large bird.
She neared a cage and made out the dim features of a Sardonian kreptaw, its clawed tentacles gripping the bars. It was about a quarter of her height and its head tracked her movement. She gave it as wide a berth as she could while maintaining an arms-length distance from the shadow-darkened cages on the opposite side.
As she passed, the kreptaw lunged, touching her arm with two tentacles that stretched between the bars. She screamed and jumped out of reach, frantically wiping the slime on her uniform. She couldn’t remember anything about the kreptaw being poisonous, but didn’t want to take her chances.
Then she froze. The thoughts of an intelligent mind had awoken on the edge of her consciousness. A semi-sentient creature was quite surprised to discover that its cage was unlocked... and quite grumpy from being awakened on an empty stomach.
The thoughts were coming from behind her, cutting her off from the door. She walked quietly, searching for another door, but in spite of her stealth the creature registered her every footfall in its mind. The scent of human flesh triggered a cascade of desire -- sweet flesh, not the alkali-saltiness of Sardonians.
The animals around her became quiet as they sensed the monster’s presence.
A breath shuddered with excitement in the darkness. It was a gutteral, pulsating exhale that gave away the creature’s size -- it was a grundaal.
The red-green-red light pattern of a doorway emerged from the darkness in front of her and she sprinted toward it. The door detected the speed of her approach and slid open sooner than usual, but it didn’t matter -- claws wrapped around one of her legs and her body jerked to a stop, slamming her down into the grated floor.
Pain pounded in her face. She gasped as claws pulled at her legs, twisting and rolling her onto her back. The creature stared down at her, saliva dripping from its bottom row of teeth, chest heaving.
Suddenly a klaxon alarm rang out and the door began to close. Flashing lights transfixed the monster. Ignoring the pain, Olivia stumbled for the closing door. The grundaal chased close behind, grabbing at her feet. She dove for the door, sliding under it as it closed.
The grundaal slammed into the obsidian door with a faint crack. Silence. Then a pounding as one of its fists hit the door, with the cracking sound of brittle stone. The door wouldn’t hold the monster for long.
The door was marked 6.30.424 -- she wasn’t far from Zaphir!
Olivia looked up the curved hallway, guessed where Zaphir’s unit would be, and closed her eyes. Sardonian minds surrounded her. Some emitted the quiet hum of deep sleep while others in shallower REM spiked with the yells, grunts and shouts of battle. Olivia reached out further, examining mind after mind, until she came upon one that was dreaming quite a different dream. Zaphir was calculating money, compounding interest. He was at the gate of paradise, trying to figure out when he would have enough coins to open the gate.
The grundaal started to pound at the door faster, starting to grow frantic. Olivia heard another cracking of stone. It knew it was close to breaking through.
She reached out to Zaphir with her mind and tried to shock him awake: “Zaphir, WAKE UP!”
Zaphir bolted upright in bed, twisting around to identify the source of the yelling. Everything in his room appeared to be in order, with no one visible save his robot, standing quietly in the corner.
“Hello?” he asked. He tried to calm his heart rate. Had it just been a dream?
“Zaphir, no, this isn’t a dream. This is Olivia -- you recruited me in Tahnekram. There’s a grundaal loose in octant 6, please call security!”
The obsidian door shattered and the grundaal burst through, charging at her. It was a massive troll-like monster, with claws for fingernails and long arms that it used to lope after her on all fours.
Olivia pulled herself up and ran, a herculean side-ache cut into her with every gasp for breath.
“Zaphir, please! This is an emergency, get security down here!”
Zaphir turned to his robot, R. Calan. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what, sir?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Thanks.”
“Is there something I can help you with?” the robot prodded.
“No, R. Calan, that’s all.”
Zaphir’s robot closed its eyes and drooped its head, resuming its night-mode position.
Mental illness would mean discharge from the service. Zaphir had planned to retire early, but not this early. He could already see the beaches of Lohlunat disappear in his mind’s eye, replaced by a one-room apartment funded by a tiny government subsidy. His knees went weak and he sat on his bed. Nothing had happened, it was probably just a dream. He climbed back under the covers.
Olivia could hear the grundaal approaching from behind, the pounding of its claws and feet echoed all around her. It swiped with its claws, cutting into her calf, but was interrupted when a crackling blackball struck the grundaal. The grundaal howled in pain and released Olivia’s leg, turning away from her toward its attacker. Olivia sprawled to the ground, clutched her leg and cried out in pain.
“Keep running!” It was her roommate, Luz.
What are you doing here? Olivia asked, pushing the question into Luz’s consciousness.
But Luz didn’t respond and Olivia felt her strength drain away like the blood running down her leg. Before she lost consciousness, Olivia reached out to Zaphir one last time: “Don’t you dare fall asleep. Get out here and help me.”
Zaphir closed his eyes.
“R. Calan,” he said, “please dispense tranquilizers. The maximum allowed dosage.”
R. Calan sent a signal to the pump in his abdomen. The pump dispensed tranquilizers through a catheter to his spinal column and in seconds, he was asleep.
Luz stopped short as the troll turned on her. Olivia had lost consciousness and there was a little pool of blood under her leg, but it was trickling, not spurting. She would probably make it and if she didn’t it was Olivia’s own fault for being sneaking out alone.
The troll loomed over her, snarling and advancing, its eyes on her blackball.
“Yeah, you want it, you Sardonian slimeface,” she said. “Come on, try to take it.”
She swung the blackball and the troll reared back, avoiding the black crackling sphere.
Then it crouched on its hind legs and leaped, coming down on top of her. She swung the blackball but the troll snatched the chain in its mouth. She tried to pull it away, but the monster’s grip was too strong. It twisted its head, swinging the ball at her so she was forced to jump away from the crackling energy.
The troll advanced on her, the blackball hanging from the chain in its mouth. She pulled an XA7 rifle from the sling of her tactical vest and activated her side-shield. The grundaal’s scales and hide were genetically modified; she would need to get a shot in its eye or open mouth, anything else would just make it angry.
It lunged and she jumped back, feeling the tingle of electricity as it passed centimeters from her cheek. Then the grundaal dropped the blackball’s chain into an open hand and pulled its arm back, winding up for a blow. Luz leaned away as the blow came, but the monster’s hand was empty! She dropped to the ground and felt the electricity of the blackball as it swung by, centimeters from her head -- the grundaal had switched the weapon into its other hand behind its back!
Luz couldn’t believe her eyes. Grundaals were only semi-sentient, where did this tactical intelligence come from?
She reached for her rifle, which had clattered to the floor, but the troll anticipated and swung the blackball, forcing her to pull back. Then she watched in disbelief as the monster picked up her rifle, nestled the butt of the weapon against its shoulder and lowered the barrel at her. She drew her pistol and fired, running backwards as plasma bursts from the rifle blasted holes in the wall and floor around her.
Before she had a chance to look where she was going, Luz crashed into the shields of a tight formation of Sardonian soldiers. Why on Palles had it taken them so long to discover that a grundaal was loose?
The soldiers in the center pulled back, forming an opening for her. She ducked through the opening and hid behind the formation as they closed in on the grundaal. Plasma bursts from the grundaal’s rifle slammed into the shields but did nothing to slow the approach of the soldiers.
The grundaal paused and lowered the rifle. It crouched and leaped into the middle of the soldiers, swinging the blackball in a high arc so it crashed down on their shields. The shields held, but the grundaal jerked it blindly, thrashing back and forth, between shields. Whenever it slipped between shields it ripped holes through armor, flesh and bones.
More soldiers poured in to fill the gaps, working together to slap half-circle silver cuffs on the troll’s wrists and ankles. As soon as a cuff made contact, it extended around the wrist or ankle to a full circle and blue lights on it started blinking. Once all four cuffs were blinking, the grundaal slowed, staggered and slumped to the ground, asleep.
Luz pushed her way through the soldiers and around the grundaal to Olivia, where she lay unconscious. Two medics were already hovering over her, checking her vitals.
Aware of someone standing over her, she turned. It was a tall Sardonian with a bronze muscle breastplate.
“Luz Archer?”
“Yes”
“Come to my office. You must answer my questions.” Then he added stiffly, “Please.”
Luz sprang up from her cot the instant Olivia hobbled into the room on a pair of crutches.
“What the sar were you thinking?!” Luz demanded. “What was I supposed to tell the general? ‘Yes, my friend is an idiot. No, I have no idea what she was doing. Yes, she often does things with no reason. Yes, I understand that can be a liability in battle’.”
“I just went to see my recruiter,” Olivia responded. “I took a wrong turn -- I have no idea how the grundaal got out.”
“Be careful what you say out loud,” she added mentally, directing her thoughts at Luz.
“Stay out of my head,” Luz responded. Then she added, “When we get back, the ethnarch is going to hear all about this.”
“The grundaal was already loose, honest!”
“And why were you sneaking out to see your recruiter in the first place? Let me guess, still hallucinating about Sardonians abandoning their gods? Listen: if you do something like this again -- anything that jeopardizes this mission -- I swear I’ll kill you and complete it without you.”
Luz whirled and stormed out the door.
Zaphir spat water from his mouth and coughed it from his lungs. Why was his head dripping wet? He opened bleary eyes and made out his android, R. Calan, standing next to the control panel, looking at him with a blank expression. There was an empty bucket at the robot’s feet and the time on the control panel read three octets past 7.
Zaphir pulled himself out of bed and straightened the blanket behind him in a quick sweeping motion before heading to the bathroom.
“I tried to wake you...” R. Calan began as Zaphir passed.
“Thank you for the stimulants,” Zaphir interrupted in a tone of perfectly-measured courtesy -- a courtesy he didn’t feel.
The stimulants that R. Calan had dispensed into his blood made his legs shake and his stomach queasy, but he didn’t complain. He dressed with maximum speed, fastened every clasp with military precision, and completed the test of the safety release on his exo-skeleton mech legs.
He tried to forget about the previous night as he stepped through his door and made his way down the hallway toward the strips. What had possessed him to take tranquilizers just because of a dream? Olivia Hasda being chased by a grundaal -- it was ridiculous!
Zaphir rounded a corner and stopped short. The ceiling and walls had gaping holes surrounded by black scorch marks; he could see through the wall down to the strips. Before and after the holes, the floor and walls had been bashed in at random intervals by something truly monstrous. Two trails of yellow blinking caution lights had been placed on the floor, indicating the narrow route down the center of the hallway with minimal damage that he was allowed to take.
A security officer was taking measurements of the scene and looked up at Zaphir as he walked by. Toward the far side, a half-meter wide stain the color of human blood marked the floor and, protruding from the far wall, was the claw of a grundaal, about a quarter-meter long.
Zaphir pulled himself up the iron-rung ladder leading into the maintenance core. His empty stomach twisted, but he set his face -- it had been foolish to flood his system with tranquilizers; he’d have to bear the consequences like a warblood Xanthu.
Zaphir reached the end of the tunnel and battlestation’s maintenance core spread out before him, a disc-shaped expanse five hundred meters across. Due to the lack of gravity, there was no distinction between ceiling and floor -- both sides were mounted with battery tanks, probes, generators, voltage converters and assorted heavy machinery. Six thousand soldiers in tight clumps of 100-soldier centuries maneuvered expertly through the gaps between large machines, approaching an army of sparring droids.
He searched for his century among the thousands of soldiers, the one group of 99. They were heading toward the right flank of the sparring droids, so Zaphir aimed and jumped. He fired the maneuvering thrusters on both sides of his legs to spin his body to land feet first.
But as he neared the soldiers, Olivia’s voice interrupted his thoughts: “You seem to be the most pleasant Sardonian there is, Zaphir -- and that’s not saying much.”
Zaphir fought to maintain self-control. So maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare -- maybe he was experiencing some kind of mental breakdown. It wouldn’t help to lose his head, the most important thing was to stay in control. Luckily, that was the one thing Zaphir knew he could do.
Too late, Zaphir refocused on the battlefield in front of him: they were practicing an unfamiliar formation; apparently his century was part of an over-powered right flank that had already cut through the opposing droids and was now wheeling around to attack the droids on the other flank from behind.
Zaphir adjusted his trajectory, but it wasn’t enough. The last-minute change left him unsteady, angling toward three soldiers at the edge of another century. They braced against his impact as he slammed into their determium shields and they pushed him away without breaking formation, sending him sprawling against the side of a white spherical probe.
He pushed off the probe and hit the steel floor with his mag-boots. He regained his footing and ran to his century, mag-boots clicking against the steel, aided by an extra boost from his maneuvering thrusters. He took his place, filling in the gap in the 3rd-to-last line of soldiers, but not before catching a glare from his centurion. It would be pain induction for sure.
His century approached the fray of sparring droids and the crackling of black stars against deterium shields. Some of the droids turned to face them; Zaphir singled out one who hadn’t. He pulled his black star back and swung.
“Why are you ignoring me, Zaphir? It’s not like I’m not likeable.”
The droid quick-stepped and spun, swinging a black star at Zaphir’s head.
Talking to her is what made him late for formation drills.
“You’re ridiculous, I didn’t make you late -- I warned you not to take those tranquilizers!”
Zaphir froze. The back of his neck itched. He dropped to the ground in time to see a blackball swing where his head had been. He backed away from the droid, his arms trembling. He could picture the blackball gliding straight through his head, leaving a gaping hole. He had seen it happen.
Suddenly the droid was thrust into the air and multiple plasma shots slammed into its head from behind, leaving it a glob of mostly-melted, smoking metal. The droid was thrown to the ground, revealing Oseph Juugar, his sergeant.
End of Sample...
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter @unashamedstudio to be notified when Zaphir's Recruit is finished and published. Or join the beta reader group to read the current draft and offer input.
This is an open project: You can post line-comments and suggest edits to the google doc, or you can send overall comments via email (peter@peterandjessica.com). You can also help us spread the word on social media: Tweet