by John Shirley
Two Kastillians fell, screaming with crossbow bolts, and then the others opened fire with their hand cannons and pulsers and the green-energy tubes, and half the oncoming Ranchers fell in a wave of death--it seemed to Jann that they were devastated by a bombardment of thunder and lightning. But then the surviving Ranchers were upon the Kaswills with scimitars, stabbing with daggers, and the Kastillians fell back, or fell dead.
Five of the Kastillians backed toward the creeper field, bringing their weapons to bear on the Ranchers--but the Kaswills had stepped back into the reach of the creepers, which whipped their purple tentacles around their legs and dragged them to ripping suckers. The Kastillian soldiers screamed piteously. The creepers showing even more killing zeal than usual, as if sensing on some primitive level that these men were invaders attacking those who had cultivated them.
Other Kastillians jumped into flyers--leaving their companions shouting angrily behind. The abandoned turned to face the Ranchers, and the fighting became close and fierce.
Jann hurried toward the battle, stumbling, falling on his face, getting up and hobbling painfully onward, shouting, "For Grelle Manor! For Sena a Grelle!".
A man shaped of flame ran toward him: a Rancher, his clothes having caught fire from the glance of an energy weapon. The man fell thrashing, dying at Jann's feet, dropping his scimitar. Jann muttered a prayer to the Great Organizer for the twitching, burning man, even as he picked up the sword--not caring the hilt burned his hand. And then he ran into the thick of the fighting.
"Murderers!" Jann shouted, and struck at a bearded Kastillian face; the sword sank in, and stuck edge--on from the man's forehead down: splitting his nose lengthwise, halving his mouth. The man clawed whimpering at the blade as Jann placed a boot on the ruined face and pulled the sword free.
He turned, dodged aside, barely escaping a pulser beam fired by a thick-bodied man shouting in wordless rage. The man then aimed very deliberately at Jann's belly--but the Kastillian went down with a bolt through the side of his neck. A crossbow bolt fired by Vonn a Vleet.
Vonn now stepped protectively in front of Jann--and immediately staggered back as he caught three Stropp rounds, bullets intended for Jann, the wounds stitched across Vonn's chest.
Vonn grunted and sagged onto his knees, then fell onto his back, his knees still tucked awkwardly under him. Jann threw the scimitar at the gunman, and it found its mark--the man stumbled back, stunned. A Free Rancher dispatched him.
Jann knelt beside Vonn, straightening his legs. Vonn gasped and pointed at the sky as Jann wept over him.
"Go there...return...go and return..." Vonn a Vleet rasped through blood welling over his lips. He seemed to stare into some private vision that filled the sky.
The gunfire and energy bursts had stopped--and a shadow fell over the field.
Jann looked up to see three enormous consecutive circles of gray blotting out the sky: the three linked segments of the Kastillian starcraft, which hovered rumbling perhaps three hundred yards overhead...
Green and gold bolts flashed down from muzzles extruding from the starcraft's underside, precision-fired with the help of a computer, and five, six, seven--eight Ranchers fell. The survivors scattered into the strip of woods bordering the grain field.
Jann picked Vonn up in his arms, and took one unsteady step...
He heard the whine of a projectile, and then there was a blinding flash of white--he was struck unconscious before he could hear the sound of the explosion.
Chapter the Third: You Are at the Beginning of the End of Your Life
"Where am I?" Jann asked.
He knew there were people in the room with him, though he seemed to be blindfolded. He was lying on a padded table of some kind.
He felt parched, his head throbbing, his body a feast of aches--in his delirium he imagined little creatures feeding on him, their serrated beaks digging into his wounds.
"Where am I? Where?" Jann repeated, more insistently. "What day is this?"
"You," said a bored male voice, "are at the beginning of the end of your life. You're a prisoner, of course. Now shut up and do us a favor--and die so we don't have to tend to you."
"They insist we save this one," said another voice in the darkness. "They have plans for him."
Jann tried to see who was speaking, but when he turned his head he could feel the bandages effectively blindfolding his eyes.
"Healing them can use up as much value as they might have as slaves," said another voice.
"Oh, it's not just for that. It's political. They need someone to stand trial, so it can all be...explain the reprisals, that kinda…"
Jann didn't hear the rest, it was blotted out by the sound of his own voice, his own uncontrollable bellowing of pain and rage.
He lashed out, and his fist caught someone's face--he felt a satisfying smack of knuckles on cartilage.
"Stinking death! Give him a shot before I put the misbegotten yokel out of his misery for good!"
He felt the needle stab deep into his right thigh--and darkness gushed from the needle, a cold shadow spreading into him and all through him, carrying with it a pitiless cycle of spiteful dreams.
#
"Ho! A dimpkin!" said the big Alpha Centauran with a sad chuckle, as Jann was thrust into the cell through the temporary door. The door sealed, becoming a seamless wall behind him.
The cell was an oblong of about twelve yards in length and eight feet high--or that was its shape at the moment. The walls were of a flexible material, unbreakable but with just a little give; an internal mesh responsive to commands from a central computer changed the shape of the cell as the jailers desired. The cell offered no windows, no visible light-source; the walls gave off bleak luminescence. The floor was uniformly padded for sleeping. The only features Jann saw at present were a small hole in the floor, he supposed for absorbing wastes, and a nozzle in the ceiling over the hole for showering. And where the walls curved together on Jann's left was a node of red glass.
The prisoner who'd called him a dimpkin was big enough to be authentically classed a giant. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his back against the grimy plasflex wall of the prison cell. Jann had never seen a Centauran in person before, but the man's bushy bone-white hair, his droopy yellowish face, and gangly giant's frame made him a typical denizen of Pren-Thak, the only inhabitable planet around the star Alpha Centauri. Like most Centaurans he was at least two and two-thirds yards tall.
A dimpkin, had he said? A dimpkin was a grazing creature, looking somewhat human but stupid, docile and four-legged, a creature which drunken spacers on the planet Dritch were known to couple with when they lacked a woman. It was also slang for the weakest man in a prison cell. Jann hoped--in a despairing, detached sort of way--that the giant wasn't the sexual predator type. He would struggle helplessly in those big hands.
"I see by your expression you don't like my sense of humor," the giant said. "Few do. It's a sad wit, and simple. So then, if you're not a dimpkin, who or what are you?"
"I am Jann a Grelle, a DemiLord of Paradine," said Jann, as proudly as he could manage.
Jann could manage little pride, however--he felt mostly a kind of infinite dejection. The cosmos now seemed a vast passion play for celebrating tragedy and death--and guilt: his own guilt at the consequences of his impulsiveness, his indifference to counsel. He looked about him and took dull note of whatever he saw, but inwardly he felt like an automaton, going through the motions.
"A DemiLord! Most impressive!" said a deep voice behind him, dripping irony.
Jann turned to see a squat, barrel-chested man with waist-length dreadlocks and a short spiky beard whose legs seemed twice too thick. He was probably from one of the heavy planets in the Sirius system, Jann thought. Maybe the planet Xantipix, double the size of Paradine.
This was confirmed as the froggish face split in a grin and the man went on, "I'm a 'Dirt Lord' from Xantipix," said the Stumper. The residents of heavy planets were called Stumpers in the interstellar vernacular. Like Jann and the Alpha Centauran, the Stumper wore featureless prison coveralls the color of luminous bile; over each prisoner's right pectoral was a scan-code indicating his number and crime.
"A Dirt Lord?" Jann was trying to be polite. "Is that, er, a kind of, ah..."
"He's toying with your head, there, because you said you were a DemiLord, don't you know," said the Centauran.
Jann shrugged. "Do you have names?"
"I'm called...." And the Xantipixian said a name that might be written Msznzossz.
"Uh--Muzoss?" Jann asked.
The Stumper sighed. "Call me Moss. Everyone does."
"I fear that I am Dervnek Zlanda," said the giant, mournfully. "In my planetary language, it means 'an additional burden'--for so my parents thought of me. Just call me Derv."
"How long have you been here?"
"Me? About what you would call two months. A little more. Two months of sameness--except when the artificial gravity failed, for an hour. I became quite nauseated, floating about, but it was a lively contrast."
"Artificial gravity? We're in space?"
"You didn't know? You are on Kastillia IntraColony 87. Once a research colony, now converted to a penal holding station. Here we are adjudged and sent to our deaths--or to become slaves, in their plantations or...or on their ships." The words on their ships were said with a weighty foreboding that sent a chill through Jann. "Moss has been here twice two months--we're waiting for the circuit judge, who is said to be coming soon..."
"It's just we three, then?" Jann asked, with no real interest.
"No," said the wall behind Moss. "I'm in here."
The voice had come from a sort of navel in the wall and air holes that looked like finger-pokes in dough. Through one of the holes Jann could see a human eye, of dark-brown hue, regarding him gravely. "I am Ivan Damuskoff, from Russia."
"What system holds the planet Russia?" Jann asked.
The others guffawed. "Truly he's an innocent!" said Moss.
The man folded into the wall sighed. "It's a country of Old Earth."
"A man from Earth?" Jann tried to seem interested. Before the destruction of his family and the Manor, he would have been. "I've never met an Earthman. Of course my ancestors were from there, but…we don't think of ourselves as Earthers."
"I am a Russian," Ivan insisted, sniffing.
"They've clutched him in there because he pretended to be sick and then jumped a guard," said Derv. "Worth trying but doomed to failure, of course."
"The wall will open soon, and his isolation will be done," said Moss. "He's been in there his seven days."
"To think I yearn to be out into that cell, which is just a slightly larger clutching," Ivan muttered. "I fervently curse all Kastillians. I wish to bed their mothers, one by one! And when I'm done with that, why--"
He went on cursing in a language Jann didn't know, probably an Earth dialect.
"Ah," said Jann, sinking down onto the floor, his back against the wall, "there I agree with you--even with the words I don't understand. The Kastillians. For the first time I could happily see an entire planet wiped out."
But even as he said it, he knew that he did not believe it. Suddenly he remembered Vonn a Vleet standing with him on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the plains. "The ranchers and the plainsmen are there below you. The harvesting classes and the Independents and the elite manor lords. The sea farers, on the coast, yonder. Immigrants from space come from time to time: there is a colony of Centaurans, on the other side of Paradine Prime, and there are Kastillian merchants in Lapis, and there are Greneks, and Fibincians, and Meremecks, and the coldblooded Repsin-simians, and the Xantipixians, and Renapps--all those are in Lapis. And countless more across the known spaceways. I have heard it said that there are yet hidden colonies of the supposedly extinct Paradinian natives deep under the sea, for they were an aquatic race. On Earth humanity is mostly merged into the Blended, but there are still recognizable Asians and Africans and Latins to be found. All these and more, Jann--including alien races we have not yet encountered...And each sentient being, human and inhuman, has an individual experience of life! We may have to come into conflict with them in fulfilling our part of the great drama--so be it. But who are we to hate them, to judge them, no matter their cruelties, their disparities? For all are united in the struggle to live without suffering--and by the suffering they must endure while they struggle. We should not hate them--even when we have to kill them."
"They say hate helps a man kill," Jann had said.
"Why so it does. But it blinds him too. If you need to kill, a truly Soldierly man will do it from an austerity, an objectivity. If you truly must kill them, in self defense, then do it. But all the while--respect them."
Now Jann shook his head in sad wonder at how every word came back to him--how deeply Vonn had impressed him. Vonn had been a vital, sharply defined person, a monument to self discipline and learning and the soldierly ideal. His own departed father seemed a genial blur by comparison. His father had been a kindly, abstracted man of all too few words, but Jann had loved him--and had long ago lost him. Now he had lost them both, and his kindly, dreamy mother too.
Vonn was surely dead--Jann had sensed only the faintest, diminishing life in him, as he'd picked his teacher up. He'd felt Vonn dying. Then Jann had been struck down, and Vonn had fallen from his arms.
Yes. Vonn was surely dead, and he, Jann a Grelle, was alone in the universe, torn from his land and torn from his world. He'd never see his skyherd again; he might well never see a sky again at all. He'd never see the green and dun plains, the gardens and fields of the Grelle lands again. Doubtless Grelle would be seized for nonpayment of taxes, in time, and Baron a Gollden would buy the property at a song. For he had tried to buy the land in the past and Sena had refused him.
As for the future--there was only the question of how he was to die, and how long it would take. And the only certainty was the evil blandness of this prison cell.
Click Here for Part 9 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Check the Freezine tomorrow,
FRIDAY, JULY 17: When we host David Agranoff's
A Planet Of Your Own
David Agranoff is the author of the short story collection Screams From A Dying World, just published by Afterbirth Books. David is a hardcore vegan and his contributions to the punk horror scene have already established him as a bright young star to watch out for.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 7
by John Shirley
Guessing he'd flown about the right distance, Jann slowly angled the flyer down through the clouds. He broke from the cloudbank's underside to open sky, saw Grelle manor about a mile away, saw the gardens, the streams, the mauve creeper fields...
Then there was a flash of green and he felt as if someone had struck him with a hot poker. His mind cleared a few seconds later, and he found himself clutching blindly at the low railing of the craft as the flyer spun around him, smoke spiraling up from its engine. He glimpsed another flyer somewhere overhead. They'd shot the craft from below and now it was damaged, had spiraled down past them, and would soon lose power completely and plunge in free fall...
He saw an island in the sky, a mesh of green and brown, below him--rushing at him. He threw himself toward it, as the flyer spun away.
He spread his arms and legs and braced himself--the smack of impact struck the consciousness from him, quite unequivocally this time.
#
The ground was rippling under him...His nose was overwhelmed by a resinous, vinegary smell...
He lifted his head and saw it wasn't the ground rippling: he was lying on an interlaced bed of skypods and their vines. He had made it to one of the skylands. He could look down through the vines and glimpse the blue sky, ten yards down, and the uplands of the Granite Expression to one side, and the banks of the River Swenn--all seen between knots of skypods. Even a wisp of low-lying cloud, down below.
Each as big as a man's head, the pods were filled with a nutritious juice and a pocket of hydrogen that kept them ballooned high over the land. The plants absorbed mineral nutrition from the extensive behemoth and bird droppings deposited in gray and black patches across the "island". He could smell those, too.
He shifted about, trying to get more comfortable, knowing better than to try to stand--just shifting sent waves of ache through him. Wincingly trying his limbs, one at a time, he decided that no bones were broken. He was deeply bruised, at least, and there was blood in his mouth; his lips were swollen and he felt a gap where an upper molar had been--a moment later he located the tooth, and spat it out.
The bloody tooth stuck to a resinous, bristly pod, and he wondered how long had he been unconscious. The sun was much lower now, he saw. Late afternoon. He'd been out for hours, then. Which meant the Kastillians thought he'd fallen to his death. Would some officer send the men out to look for his body?
The reek of pod resin and behemoth droppings was too much. He had to move his face away from the mat a little, at least. He thought that if he moved slowly, carefully, he might be able to sit up. He couldn't see Grelle manor from this position--it was somewhere behind him.
The wind increased as the sun began to sink behind distant clouds--the foreshortened horizon of the skypods wavered in the rising wind, and the ripple traveled toward Jann just as he was easing himself into a sitting position on two pods. He didn't see the wave traveling through the skypods at first--he was looking over his shoulder, staring at the twisting column of black smoke exactly where Grelle Manor would be.
"Oh no..." How was he to get to his mother from here? How was he to get down at all?
Then a kind of wind-driven tsunami of skypod foliage came rolling over him from the outer edge--it loomed three yards over him...
He had just time to see it and swear, "Reeking death!"
And then it crashed down, and he was flung from his perch and felt himself tossed about until his support was pulled from under him and he was sliding down through the vines, falling faster and faster, tossed this way and that, skin burned by the bristles as he went.
He was going to fall straight through. He would be splashed over the brutal stone of the Granite Expression.
He flailed, grabbed a vine, hung on--hung there, panting and cursing, clinging to the vine with one hand--
And felt it snap in his hand. "No!" He kicked out with his hands and arms, trying to contact as many vines as possible, spread his weight around. They slapped him hard in the face so that his nose bloodied...
And then he stopped, or nearly--he was bouncing, slightly, in a tangle of vines. His feet and legs extended under the mat, from the crotch downward, into naked sky. One of his feet felt cold and he looked down in time to see the boot from his right foot spinning downward, and gone.
He ached from the impacts, his skin itched and burned everywhere it was exposed, blood ran from his nose and mouth...and if he moved, chances were he'd fall. The dusk was growing upon the land, and soon he would fall into the shadows.
He looked around through the increasing shadowiness of the vines, trying to find something to grip onto. Something solid enough to take his weight. But no single vine would do it--only by spreading your weight over many vines and pods could you survive up here.
The wind was rising...
The pods undulated in response, another great wave going through. The wave slapped at him so that he slipped down a little more and a vine broke under his right armpit. He cursed, and tried to relax, to ease pressure on the vines. He was afraid even to breathe hard.
The vines rippled again...he slipped down a little more...
And the rising wind brought something else: the smell of smoke. Of burning timbers--and other smells he was afraid to identify.
Then he heard a mournful grumbling reverberate from a good distance away. He went as limp as he could, tried spread his arms a bit more, took a deep breath, and shouted, "E'qer'minda'moy!"
Quickly to me!
No response. He shouted it again. And again. Ten times more till his throat was hoarse. The rising wind drowned his voice--and another vine parted under his crotch. He fell--
And grabbed at a thick vine just beside his head as he went.
He caught the vine, it pulled slack, then taut, he fell further--and stopped, swaying. Hanging by his hands under the skypod mat, dangling there...afraid to look down.
"E'QER'MINDA'MOY!"
This time there came an answering rumble, and a low-pitched bellow. Then something drifted closer, something he'd seen from the corner of his eyes, as he'd fallen, and taken to be a cloud--it was a behemoth, below and to his right.
But the final vine snapped--he fell--
And the behemoth was there, catching him with only a three yard drop. He landed on his right foot first and felt something give way in the ankle.
He pitched onto his back, shouting with pain. But now he was riding a behemoth--and he knew Aleshna by its rumble.
#
Completely barefoot, Jann walked down the road to the manor. His skin itched and burned with the welts left by skypod scratches, his gut ached with the injuries from his fall and his ankle lanced pain up into his leg with each step.
He'd been afraid to fly the behemoth too close to the house; the Kastillians might have men still posted there. Walking around the final curve, before he came in clear site of the manor, he knew what he would see before he saw it, when the smoke blew over him once more. There is a particular smell to a freshly burned and shattered building--particularly one destroyed by explosives. He had never smelled it before, but it seemed somehow familiar to him.
And then he saw what was left of the manor, and felt the last shred of hope dry up and blow away in some limitless interior wasteland. Before him was the flame-crackling wreckage of his childhood home--and the childhood home of his father, and his grandfather and great grandfather. Only a bit of the southeast wall stood, with a chimney, a fireplace standing absurdly alone; the rest was rubble and heaps of smoking ashes.
Coughing with fumes from the embers, he circled the house, calling to his mother, to Keska; to Vonn. Seeing no one, receiving no reply. But there--a blistered human arm thrust from the masonry: he thought it was probably the cook, E'Kenna, judging by the charred remnants of a sleeve.
He went on, circumscribing the vast, smoldering ruin. He came upon two other bodies: both were Kastillians, shot by crossbow bolts--shot from above, it looked like. The Kastillians had come here in force, and destroyed the house in retaliation for his having killed four of their number.
He stared for a moment, then continued onward, looking for his mother. He had given off calling to her. He was very much afraid he'd find her, soon enough.
The Overlook lay smashed on the sideyard, balusters scattered and blackened, ritual objects reduced to trash in the weedy flower garden. He'd never noticed before how overgrown with weeds and ill-kept the garden about the house had become, with Mother always on her rounds or taking care of him and the servants-- doing as much for the servants as they did for her.
He must have passed her the first time, but he found her when he returned to the wreck of the Overlook balcony, thinking of the Imploring Wand he had seen there amongst a tangle of Sweep-Lilies. The wand snapped in half as if the Great Organizer were mocking them.
A still-burning slab of wall hid Mother's body. He had only to squat down once, to look that one time only, to see what he would revisit in memory on many lonely nights to come.
He fell to his knees and began to dig at the dirt around her body, to pull her remains free--they were so crushed he doubted he could get them all out in one piece--when he heard the growing sounds of battle.
A battle. With it, the hope of revenge, an outlet for the pain and rage that burned through him now. Later, he knew, he would face another truth: this wasn't only the fault of the Kastillians. If he had listened to Vonn…
He almost tripped over Keska's body, half hidden in high grass, as he ran--hobbled, really--toward the sounds of fighting. Old Keska a Blunn--it looked like he'd been on the balcony with mother. Keska had been thrown clear by the blast that had smashed the wall from the other side, then shot with a Stropp in the back of the head by some passing Kastillian.
The battle was a few hundred yards away in a field of grain--about two dozen Kastillians had been surprised at their landed flyers by a force of Free Ranchers in buckskin and rough woolen tunics, near the edge of a creeper-field. Even as Jann came upon the scene, the Ranchers charged, some riding tallies and others on foot, firing crossbows and brandishing the long slim double-edged scimitars typical of Paradine Plainsmen. And there--in the midst of the men charging--was Vonn!
Vonn had come, but too late. Fighting at his side were about thirty men and ten women, of every age from nineteen to sixty. Women from the Free Ranchers were well known to be fierce fighters-- and they charged, screeching their war-cries at the startled Kastillians.
Click Here for Part 8 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Guessing he'd flown about the right distance, Jann slowly angled the flyer down through the clouds. He broke from the cloudbank's underside to open sky, saw Grelle manor about a mile away, saw the gardens, the streams, the mauve creeper fields...
Then there was a flash of green and he felt as if someone had struck him with a hot poker. His mind cleared a few seconds later, and he found himself clutching blindly at the low railing of the craft as the flyer spun around him, smoke spiraling up from its engine. He glimpsed another flyer somewhere overhead. They'd shot the craft from below and now it was damaged, had spiraled down past them, and would soon lose power completely and plunge in free fall...
He saw an island in the sky, a mesh of green and brown, below him--rushing at him. He threw himself toward it, as the flyer spun away.
He spread his arms and legs and braced himself--the smack of impact struck the consciousness from him, quite unequivocally this time.
#
The ground was rippling under him...His nose was overwhelmed by a resinous, vinegary smell...
He lifted his head and saw it wasn't the ground rippling: he was lying on an interlaced bed of skypods and their vines. He had made it to one of the skylands. He could look down through the vines and glimpse the blue sky, ten yards down, and the uplands of the Granite Expression to one side, and the banks of the River Swenn--all seen between knots of skypods. Even a wisp of low-lying cloud, down below.
Each as big as a man's head, the pods were filled with a nutritious juice and a pocket of hydrogen that kept them ballooned high over the land. The plants absorbed mineral nutrition from the extensive behemoth and bird droppings deposited in gray and black patches across the "island". He could smell those, too.
He shifted about, trying to get more comfortable, knowing better than to try to stand--just shifting sent waves of ache through him. Wincingly trying his limbs, one at a time, he decided that no bones were broken. He was deeply bruised, at least, and there was blood in his mouth; his lips were swollen and he felt a gap where an upper molar had been--a moment later he located the tooth, and spat it out.
The bloody tooth stuck to a resinous, bristly pod, and he wondered how long had he been unconscious. The sun was much lower now, he saw. Late afternoon. He'd been out for hours, then. Which meant the Kastillians thought he'd fallen to his death. Would some officer send the men out to look for his body?
The reek of pod resin and behemoth droppings was too much. He had to move his face away from the mat a little, at least. He thought that if he moved slowly, carefully, he might be able to sit up. He couldn't see Grelle manor from this position--it was somewhere behind him.
The wind increased as the sun began to sink behind distant clouds--the foreshortened horizon of the skypods wavered in the rising wind, and the ripple traveled toward Jann just as he was easing himself into a sitting position on two pods. He didn't see the wave traveling through the skypods at first--he was looking over his shoulder, staring at the twisting column of black smoke exactly where Grelle Manor would be.
"Oh no..." How was he to get to his mother from here? How was he to get down at all?
Then a kind of wind-driven tsunami of skypod foliage came rolling over him from the outer edge--it loomed three yards over him...
He had just time to see it and swear, "Reeking death!"
And then it crashed down, and he was flung from his perch and felt himself tossed about until his support was pulled from under him and he was sliding down through the vines, falling faster and faster, tossed this way and that, skin burned by the bristles as he went.
He was going to fall straight through. He would be splashed over the brutal stone of the Granite Expression.
He flailed, grabbed a vine, hung on--hung there, panting and cursing, clinging to the vine with one hand--
And felt it snap in his hand. "No!" He kicked out with his hands and arms, trying to contact as many vines as possible, spread his weight around. They slapped him hard in the face so that his nose bloodied...
And then he stopped, or nearly--he was bouncing, slightly, in a tangle of vines. His feet and legs extended under the mat, from the crotch downward, into naked sky. One of his feet felt cold and he looked down in time to see the boot from his right foot spinning downward, and gone.
He ached from the impacts, his skin itched and burned everywhere it was exposed, blood ran from his nose and mouth...and if he moved, chances were he'd fall. The dusk was growing upon the land, and soon he would fall into the shadows.
He looked around through the increasing shadowiness of the vines, trying to find something to grip onto. Something solid enough to take his weight. But no single vine would do it--only by spreading your weight over many vines and pods could you survive up here.
The wind was rising...
The pods undulated in response, another great wave going through. The wave slapped at him so that he slipped down a little more and a vine broke under his right armpit. He cursed, and tried to relax, to ease pressure on the vines. He was afraid even to breathe hard.
The vines rippled again...he slipped down a little more...
And the rising wind brought something else: the smell of smoke. Of burning timbers--and other smells he was afraid to identify.
Then he heard a mournful grumbling reverberate from a good distance away. He went as limp as he could, tried spread his arms a bit more, took a deep breath, and shouted, "E'qer'minda'moy!"
Quickly to me!
No response. He shouted it again. And again. Ten times more till his throat was hoarse. The rising wind drowned his voice--and another vine parted under his crotch. He fell--
And grabbed at a thick vine just beside his head as he went.
He caught the vine, it pulled slack, then taut, he fell further--and stopped, swaying. Hanging by his hands under the skypod mat, dangling there...afraid to look down.
"E'QER'MINDA'MOY!"
This time there came an answering rumble, and a low-pitched bellow. Then something drifted closer, something he'd seen from the corner of his eyes, as he'd fallen, and taken to be a cloud--it was a behemoth, below and to his right.
But the final vine snapped--he fell--
And the behemoth was there, catching him with only a three yard drop. He landed on his right foot first and felt something give way in the ankle.
He pitched onto his back, shouting with pain. But now he was riding a behemoth--and he knew Aleshna by its rumble.
#
Completely barefoot, Jann walked down the road to the manor. His skin itched and burned with the welts left by skypod scratches, his gut ached with the injuries from his fall and his ankle lanced pain up into his leg with each step.
He'd been afraid to fly the behemoth too close to the house; the Kastillians might have men still posted there. Walking around the final curve, before he came in clear site of the manor, he knew what he would see before he saw it, when the smoke blew over him once more. There is a particular smell to a freshly burned and shattered building--particularly one destroyed by explosives. He had never smelled it before, but it seemed somehow familiar to him.
And then he saw what was left of the manor, and felt the last shred of hope dry up and blow away in some limitless interior wasteland. Before him was the flame-crackling wreckage of his childhood home--and the childhood home of his father, and his grandfather and great grandfather. Only a bit of the southeast wall stood, with a chimney, a fireplace standing absurdly alone; the rest was rubble and heaps of smoking ashes.
Coughing with fumes from the embers, he circled the house, calling to his mother, to Keska; to Vonn. Seeing no one, receiving no reply. But there--a blistered human arm thrust from the masonry: he thought it was probably the cook, E'Kenna, judging by the charred remnants of a sleeve.
He went on, circumscribing the vast, smoldering ruin. He came upon two other bodies: both were Kastillians, shot by crossbow bolts--shot from above, it looked like. The Kastillians had come here in force, and destroyed the house in retaliation for his having killed four of their number.
He stared for a moment, then continued onward, looking for his mother. He had given off calling to her. He was very much afraid he'd find her, soon enough.
The Overlook lay smashed on the sideyard, balusters scattered and blackened, ritual objects reduced to trash in the weedy flower garden. He'd never noticed before how overgrown with weeds and ill-kept the garden about the house had become, with Mother always on her rounds or taking care of him and the servants-- doing as much for the servants as they did for her.
He must have passed her the first time, but he found her when he returned to the wreck of the Overlook balcony, thinking of the Imploring Wand he had seen there amongst a tangle of Sweep-Lilies. The wand snapped in half as if the Great Organizer were mocking them.
A still-burning slab of wall hid Mother's body. He had only to squat down once, to look that one time only, to see what he would revisit in memory on many lonely nights to come.
He fell to his knees and began to dig at the dirt around her body, to pull her remains free--they were so crushed he doubted he could get them all out in one piece--when he heard the growing sounds of battle.
A battle. With it, the hope of revenge, an outlet for the pain and rage that burned through him now. Later, he knew, he would face another truth: this wasn't only the fault of the Kastillians. If he had listened to Vonn…
He almost tripped over Keska's body, half hidden in high grass, as he ran--hobbled, really--toward the sounds of fighting. Old Keska a Blunn--it looked like he'd been on the balcony with mother. Keska had been thrown clear by the blast that had smashed the wall from the other side, then shot with a Stropp in the back of the head by some passing Kastillian.
The battle was a few hundred yards away in a field of grain--about two dozen Kastillians had been surprised at their landed flyers by a force of Free Ranchers in buckskin and rough woolen tunics, near the edge of a creeper-field. Even as Jann came upon the scene, the Ranchers charged, some riding tallies and others on foot, firing crossbows and brandishing the long slim double-edged scimitars typical of Paradine Plainsmen. And there--in the midst of the men charging--was Vonn!
Vonn had come, but too late. Fighting at his side were about thirty men and ten women, of every age from nineteen to sixty. Women from the Free Ranchers were well known to be fierce fighters-- and they charged, screeching their war-cries at the startled Kastillians.
Click Here for Part 8 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 6
by John Shirley
Chapter the Second: The Tightening Gyre
Keska a Blunn, older brother of Mandeska and Sena Grelle's MajorDomo, gnawed a knuckle as he paced the landing outside Sena a Grelle’s office. Shouldn't they be searching for young Jann? The boy could be arrogant but Keska felt a paternal fondness toward him. He had kept an eye on Jann more than once when he was a toddler. And if he should fall into the hands of the Kastillians—for the report had come back that Kastillian flyers were pursuing a young rider across the fields—why, it would destroy Mamm Sena, who had nearly buckled under the loss of her husband, and he so young when he fell to his death. Keska had been amongst those who had found the crushed remains of the elder Lord of Grelle imprinted into a grassy goat-run, the animals cropping peacefully around his staring, purpled face. In the manor lord’s dead face Keska had perceived an expression of horrified recognition, as if in his last moments Jann's father had seen his family’s whole tragedy unfold—yes, perhaps he’d seen even this day, which boded so badly for the DemiLord Jann a Grelle.
Keska spun on his heel when Sena opened the door—his heart sank at her expression. “I communicated with the Peacekeeper," she said. "They insist on having some sort of meeting before they decide what to do. There are political ramifications it seems...” She smiled in sad irony, her slender face even paler than usual.
Sena was a tall, stooped woman with straight black hair and dark deep set eyes that seemed strangely to have been designed to go with the colors of Grelle manor; she wore a flowing robe in the family colors, and black slippers. She could seem a frail woman but Keska knew better.
“So while they’re nattering...” Keska began—but thought better of completing the thought aloud: Jann will be taken, then quite likely killed. Instead, he intoned, “’The Great Organizer remembers faith kept in darkness.’”
She nodded vaguely. “I will go to the Overlook and perform the Supplication to the Galactic Core...”
“Mamm, so will you not!”
She looked at him with a kind of tender reproach. “Are you ordering me about, Keska?”
“Mamm, I am not. But the Kastillians are known for their reprisals! You will come with me to a certain village where they will not seek you out. In the meantime, perhaps Vonn a Vleet will come with the Free Ranchers.”
“Surely he will—and I will be here when he does.”
Jann's mother went with quiet confidence down the hallway and through the double glass doors to the Overlook. Here a cupola provided a prospect of Grelle lands—including the little family cemetery under the Sighing Trees to the South, beside the River Swenn.
Keska followed her, and fretted as she opened the carved casket under the Sweep-lilies that trailed along the balustrade. She took out incense, incense burners and Imploring Wands. “How sweet the air smells this afternoon,” she murmured, as she set these things out on an old oaken table used for Supplications—and funerals. “How sharp the scents from the fields, how soft the air on my skin—my senses seem to have the acuteness of finality...”
“Mamm—no! You will come with me!”
She set the incense in the burners, and looked in the casket for matches. “I do not wish to outlive my son. If he lives, then I will too--remaining here. My family has been respected by the Plainsmen—and yes by the Ranchers and the manors-- for two hundred seventy years. We came with the first ships which landed not ten miles from here. My husband’s family came on the same ships, Keska. I will remain here and send prayers up to the Galactic Core. Who knows? The Great Organizer is austere and largely indifferent to individual people—but perhaps I will be heard.” She chuckled. “So my grandmother would say.”
“Perhaps, Mamm,” said Keska a Blunn, hoarsely.
#
Jann hung by his aching hands from the drainage pipe edging the roof. He heard a shout from below—he’d been seen. Another flyer rounded the house. The ruse had worked for a few painful minutes, the flyer having passed over the roof without seeing him hanging off one side, but it was used up. He did a grunting pull-up and dragged himself back onto the roof's walkway, under the dome.
He rubbed his throbbing arms—even as a flyer containing two Kaswills lofted up and Jann found himself staring into two angry Kastillian faces, the spacers raising weapons he had never seen before.
He threw himself down as a bolt of livid-green energy sizzled over his head, then scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the far side of the dome, jumped onto the adjoining room, ducked behind a chimney—which exploded under the impact of a projectile. He threw himself flat on the roof; fragments of brick and mortar clattered down over him and he shouted in pain—deliberately exaggerating, as he thrust the hand holding his crossbow out of the coating of rubble as if in death throes.
Then Jann lay still and waited.
It was the rubble half covering him that made him think they might want to look at him up close instead of trying to carry out a coup de grace from a distance. The rubble would make a kill uncertain.
He held his breath as the flyer whirred near and hovered not far above, a little to his right. He heard one of them say something –Kastillian words he didn’t know—and then the vibrating thump as the soldier dropped from the flyer onto the rooftop. The crunch of approaching footsteps…
Jann just lay there. He lay as limply as he could, wanting to scream with tension as the man began to pluck chunks of broken brick and masonry from him. Clearing the back of his neck so he could fire a shot into his head...
“That should do it,” the man said.
Jann suddenly twisted, rolling to point the crossbow with his right hand—into the Kaswill’s face. The man’s nose was just inches from the tip of his bolt.
“Don’t move!” Jann barked at the startled man in System Wide. He was a young man, with regular features marred by a scar extending from the right side of his mouth. The scar, hinting of a sad life history, together with the Kaswill’s frightened look, prompted Jann to say: “I give you your life--if you drop the weapon!”
“Kill him or get out of the way!” the other soldier shouted in Kastillian to the young soldier facing Jann.
“Drop it or die!” Jann barked.
The weapon clattered to the roof. But Jann heard the drone of another flyer approaching.
“Back toward the flyer,” Jann said. The man began backing up, and Jann got up and went with him, keeping the crossbow bolt pointed with his right hand—with his left he reached down and picked up the energy weapon, just a tube with a stud next to a gripper at one end. The soldier’s eyes wavered as they watched the crossbow-bolt’s point, moving slightly as Jann’s hand shook.
Looking so closely into this man’s face, seeing the fear there, made Jann uncomfortably aware of the spacer’s humanity. That this man had a whole life history behind him...
“Get out of the way or I’ll shoot you both!” said the man in the flyer.
“Throw yourself forward and down to my right,” Jann whispered, to the nearer Fighter, “and I promise you’ll live!”
The other flyer was coming from behind...
The scarred Kaswill fighter stared at the point of Jann’s crossbow bolt—and threw himself flat.
Jann swung the crossbow and fired from just a yard away at the man in the nearest flyer. The man screamed and clutched at his chest. Then Jann was running, vaulting into the flyer, even as a flash of green burnt past his arm, charring his sleeve. He dropped the crossbow and turned to aim the energy tube left-handed from his own flyer at the oncoming craft—hoping that he had the unfamiliar weapon pointed at the enemy and not at himself. He pressed the stud and a bolt of livid green sizzled from the tube with a reek of ozone. The pilot of the other flyer screamed, clutched at his face which vanished into black char. The craft wobbled off course, flashing past on Jann’s right.
And Jann thought, How quickly it becomes easy to kill...
He looked desperately at the controls of his own flyer—there was a foot pedal, a joystick...It seemed simple...
Another flyer was coming from his left, two men in it shouting at him.
No time for a flyer lesson. He sat on the pilot’s seat, pressed the pedal, grabbed the joystick and pulled back on it as the other craft came sailing through the air toward him—Jann’s flyer rocketed almost straight up so that only his grip on the joystick kept him in the craft. His feet now dangled down parallel to the rocketing aircraft. The dying Kaswill fighter tumbled away as G-force tried to drag Jann from his hold and he gritted his teeth and struggled to keep his grip.
His flyer’s hull shuddered under him, struck indirectly by a projectile from beneath. But it kept going, fishtailing through the air, nearly out of control.
The wayward flyer’s unpredictable trajectory made it hard to hit-- energy beams flashed by him and hand-cannons boomed but none struck home. But he was losing his grip on the joystick—he might fall out at any moment. And end up dying like his father, after all: a long tumble through terror and then the ground striking like a hammer…
Suddenly he was awash in whiteness and wet—the clouds! The gunfire stopped and he realized he was camouflaged from below, at least visually. It would take them time to locate him on scanners.
Jann wedged his feet against the inner rim of the flyer’s hull and--pushing with his whole body—pressed forward on the joystick. The vehicle righted just as it broke from the clouds, skating along the top of the white billows like a speedboat across water, leaving a misty wake. He was almost joyful, then—astounded to be alive.
He got up onto the pilot’s seat, brought the flyer around in a semicircle and headed in the direction the manor should be, judging by the position of the sun.
After his heart had stopped pounding quite so loudly, he felt something gummy on the joystick. Blood, from the man he’d shot in the flyer. He wiped his hands as best he could and tried to forget it.
But a series of mental images came insistently, clear as a holofilm—a man falling back with a crossbow bolt rivening his throat; another man collapsing in a doorway, screaming at the pain in his belly; a third man clutching his chest in the flyer. A man’s face burning away. All people he had killed.
He retched and had to throw up over the side of the flyer. Then he sat back miserably on the piloting seat, exhausted, he felt sick at heart though his stomach had quieted. Thinking that it was not so easy to get used to as he supposed—it simply caught up with you later.
He had killed only one other man, before this day: a hostile mountain primitive on a reprisal expedition with Vonn, a year before; but he’d shot the man with the crossbow at a good distance, his enemy falling into a crevasse, and he hadn’t had to watch him die. He’d fought two other men in sanctioned duels with edged rapiers— but they were duels only to the first bloodletting, and neither man, though defeated, had died. Men? Boys of seventeen and eighteen. He could not have brought himself to kill them.
The man in the doorway had seemed almost that young.
Jann shook himself and growled, “Get over it, cur!” Said it aloud, his words lost in the wail of the wind, the emptiness of the great spaces around him. He must pull himself together and get to the manor, find Vonn and his mother.
Something else occurred to him. He had killed several Kastillians now. Four. The fury of the Kastillians would be multiplied four times.
Click Here for Part 7 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Chapter the Second: The Tightening Gyre
Keska a Blunn, older brother of Mandeska and Sena Grelle's MajorDomo, gnawed a knuckle as he paced the landing outside Sena a Grelle’s office. Shouldn't they be searching for young Jann? The boy could be arrogant but Keska felt a paternal fondness toward him. He had kept an eye on Jann more than once when he was a toddler. And if he should fall into the hands of the Kastillians—for the report had come back that Kastillian flyers were pursuing a young rider across the fields—why, it would destroy Mamm Sena, who had nearly buckled under the loss of her husband, and he so young when he fell to his death. Keska had been amongst those who had found the crushed remains of the elder Lord of Grelle imprinted into a grassy goat-run, the animals cropping peacefully around his staring, purpled face. In the manor lord’s dead face Keska had perceived an expression of horrified recognition, as if in his last moments Jann's father had seen his family’s whole tragedy unfold—yes, perhaps he’d seen even this day, which boded so badly for the DemiLord Jann a Grelle.
Keska spun on his heel when Sena opened the door—his heart sank at her expression. “I communicated with the Peacekeeper," she said. "They insist on having some sort of meeting before they decide what to do. There are political ramifications it seems...” She smiled in sad irony, her slender face even paler than usual.
Sena was a tall, stooped woman with straight black hair and dark deep set eyes that seemed strangely to have been designed to go with the colors of Grelle manor; she wore a flowing robe in the family colors, and black slippers. She could seem a frail woman but Keska knew better.
“So while they’re nattering...” Keska began—but thought better of completing the thought aloud: Jann will be taken, then quite likely killed. Instead, he intoned, “’The Great Organizer remembers faith kept in darkness.’”
She nodded vaguely. “I will go to the Overlook and perform the Supplication to the Galactic Core...”
“Mamm, so will you not!”
She looked at him with a kind of tender reproach. “Are you ordering me about, Keska?”
“Mamm, I am not. But the Kastillians are known for their reprisals! You will come with me to a certain village where they will not seek you out. In the meantime, perhaps Vonn a Vleet will come with the Free Ranchers.”
“Surely he will—and I will be here when he does.”
Jann's mother went with quiet confidence down the hallway and through the double glass doors to the Overlook. Here a cupola provided a prospect of Grelle lands—including the little family cemetery under the Sighing Trees to the South, beside the River Swenn.
Keska followed her, and fretted as she opened the carved casket under the Sweep-lilies that trailed along the balustrade. She took out incense, incense burners and Imploring Wands. “How sweet the air smells this afternoon,” she murmured, as she set these things out on an old oaken table used for Supplications—and funerals. “How sharp the scents from the fields, how soft the air on my skin—my senses seem to have the acuteness of finality...”
“Mamm—no! You will come with me!”
She set the incense in the burners, and looked in the casket for matches. “I do not wish to outlive my son. If he lives, then I will too--remaining here. My family has been respected by the Plainsmen—and yes by the Ranchers and the manors-- for two hundred seventy years. We came with the first ships which landed not ten miles from here. My husband’s family came on the same ships, Keska. I will remain here and send prayers up to the Galactic Core. Who knows? The Great Organizer is austere and largely indifferent to individual people—but perhaps I will be heard.” She chuckled. “So my grandmother would say.”
“Perhaps, Mamm,” said Keska a Blunn, hoarsely.
#
Jann hung by his aching hands from the drainage pipe edging the roof. He heard a shout from below—he’d been seen. Another flyer rounded the house. The ruse had worked for a few painful minutes, the flyer having passed over the roof without seeing him hanging off one side, but it was used up. He did a grunting pull-up and dragged himself back onto the roof's walkway, under the dome.
He rubbed his throbbing arms—even as a flyer containing two Kaswills lofted up and Jann found himself staring into two angry Kastillian faces, the spacers raising weapons he had never seen before.
He threw himself down as a bolt of livid-green energy sizzled over his head, then scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the far side of the dome, jumped onto the adjoining room, ducked behind a chimney—which exploded under the impact of a projectile. He threw himself flat on the roof; fragments of brick and mortar clattered down over him and he shouted in pain—deliberately exaggerating, as he thrust the hand holding his crossbow out of the coating of rubble as if in death throes.
Then Jann lay still and waited.
It was the rubble half covering him that made him think they might want to look at him up close instead of trying to carry out a coup de grace from a distance. The rubble would make a kill uncertain.
He held his breath as the flyer whirred near and hovered not far above, a little to his right. He heard one of them say something –Kastillian words he didn’t know—and then the vibrating thump as the soldier dropped from the flyer onto the rooftop. The crunch of approaching footsteps…
Jann just lay there. He lay as limply as he could, wanting to scream with tension as the man began to pluck chunks of broken brick and masonry from him. Clearing the back of his neck so he could fire a shot into his head...
“That should do it,” the man said.
Jann suddenly twisted, rolling to point the crossbow with his right hand—into the Kaswill’s face. The man’s nose was just inches from the tip of his bolt.
“Don’t move!” Jann barked at the startled man in System Wide. He was a young man, with regular features marred by a scar extending from the right side of his mouth. The scar, hinting of a sad life history, together with the Kaswill’s frightened look, prompted Jann to say: “I give you your life--if you drop the weapon!”
“Kill him or get out of the way!” the other soldier shouted in Kastillian to the young soldier facing Jann.
“Drop it or die!” Jann barked.
The weapon clattered to the roof. But Jann heard the drone of another flyer approaching.
“Back toward the flyer,” Jann said. The man began backing up, and Jann got up and went with him, keeping the crossbow bolt pointed with his right hand—with his left he reached down and picked up the energy weapon, just a tube with a stud next to a gripper at one end. The soldier’s eyes wavered as they watched the crossbow-bolt’s point, moving slightly as Jann’s hand shook.
Looking so closely into this man’s face, seeing the fear there, made Jann uncomfortably aware of the spacer’s humanity. That this man had a whole life history behind him...
“Get out of the way or I’ll shoot you both!” said the man in the flyer.
“Throw yourself forward and down to my right,” Jann whispered, to the nearer Fighter, “and I promise you’ll live!”
The other flyer was coming from behind...
The scarred Kaswill fighter stared at the point of Jann’s crossbow bolt—and threw himself flat.
Jann swung the crossbow and fired from just a yard away at the man in the nearest flyer. The man screamed and clutched at his chest. Then Jann was running, vaulting into the flyer, even as a flash of green burnt past his arm, charring his sleeve. He dropped the crossbow and turned to aim the energy tube left-handed from his own flyer at the oncoming craft—hoping that he had the unfamiliar weapon pointed at the enemy and not at himself. He pressed the stud and a bolt of livid green sizzled from the tube with a reek of ozone. The pilot of the other flyer screamed, clutched at his face which vanished into black char. The craft wobbled off course, flashing past on Jann’s right.
And Jann thought, How quickly it becomes easy to kill...
He looked desperately at the controls of his own flyer—there was a foot pedal, a joystick...It seemed simple...
Another flyer was coming from his left, two men in it shouting at him.
No time for a flyer lesson. He sat on the pilot’s seat, pressed the pedal, grabbed the joystick and pulled back on it as the other craft came sailing through the air toward him—Jann’s flyer rocketed almost straight up so that only his grip on the joystick kept him in the craft. His feet now dangled down parallel to the rocketing aircraft. The dying Kaswill fighter tumbled away as G-force tried to drag Jann from his hold and he gritted his teeth and struggled to keep his grip.
His flyer’s hull shuddered under him, struck indirectly by a projectile from beneath. But it kept going, fishtailing through the air, nearly out of control.
The wayward flyer’s unpredictable trajectory made it hard to hit-- energy beams flashed by him and hand-cannons boomed but none struck home. But he was losing his grip on the joystick—he might fall out at any moment. And end up dying like his father, after all: a long tumble through terror and then the ground striking like a hammer…
Suddenly he was awash in whiteness and wet—the clouds! The gunfire stopped and he realized he was camouflaged from below, at least visually. It would take them time to locate him on scanners.
Jann wedged his feet against the inner rim of the flyer’s hull and--pushing with his whole body—pressed forward on the joystick. The vehicle righted just as it broke from the clouds, skating along the top of the white billows like a speedboat across water, leaving a misty wake. He was almost joyful, then—astounded to be alive.
He got up onto the pilot’s seat, brought the flyer around in a semicircle and headed in the direction the manor should be, judging by the position of the sun.
After his heart had stopped pounding quite so loudly, he felt something gummy on the joystick. Blood, from the man he’d shot in the flyer. He wiped his hands as best he could and tried to forget it.
But a series of mental images came insistently, clear as a holofilm—a man falling back with a crossbow bolt rivening his throat; another man collapsing in a doorway, screaming at the pain in his belly; a third man clutching his chest in the flyer. A man’s face burning away. All people he had killed.
He retched and had to throw up over the side of the flyer. Then he sat back miserably on the piloting seat, exhausted, he felt sick at heart though his stomach had quieted. Thinking that it was not so easy to get used to as he supposed—it simply caught up with you later.
He had killed only one other man, before this day: a hostile mountain primitive on a reprisal expedition with Vonn, a year before; but he’d shot the man with the crossbow at a good distance, his enemy falling into a crevasse, and he hadn’t had to watch him die. He’d fought two other men in sanctioned duels with edged rapiers— but they were duels only to the first bloodletting, and neither man, though defeated, had died. Men? Boys of seventeen and eighteen. He could not have brought himself to kill them.
The man in the doorway had seemed almost that young.
Jann shook himself and growled, “Get over it, cur!” Said it aloud, his words lost in the wail of the wind, the emptiness of the great spaces around him. He must pull himself together and get to the manor, find Vonn and his mother.
Something else occurred to him. He had killed several Kastillians now. Four. The fury of the Kastillians would be multiplied four times.
Click Here for Part 7 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Monday, July 13, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 5
by John Shirley
Instinctively, he caught up the crossbow from the saddle hook. He gripped the weapon so it was ready to fire, though pointed at the ground.
“Have you not heard me, when I spoke my rank?” Jann said, trying to keep his voice even. “I am a DemiLord here. I am the only Heir to Grelle Manor! I have diplomatically called you my equal –so speak to me with the respect due me!”
“In no sense are you my equal, yokel,” the officer said loudly, showing off for the others. “You are not even the equal of the boy who cleans the crew toilets.” There was a roar of approving laughter from his men. “Now drop that primitive weapon, and get down off that foul smelling beast—washed and gutted, it will make a fine meal for our Autocrats! Then you can go crawling back to your manor—and when I say crawl, I mean crawl!” His crew laughed at that.
Jann would surrender his tallie to no man; he would crawl for no man. He flicked the safety off his crossbow, which automatically triggered a spring that drew the arrow to readiness.
The officer noticed the tightening of the bowstring, the readiness of the bolt—his eyes narrowed and he visibly tensed.
Jann's mouth went dry…
The officer said, “Boy—you get down off that beast... or I’ll knock you off it.”
And the officer drew his side arm. This he did by thrusting his whole hand into its wrist-engager, which gripped his arm even as he snapped the pulser up from its holster to aim at Jann, fingers closing over the three-finger trigger—
These things Jann saw in an instant of slowed time, in which the officer's actions seemed the inexorable working of the machinery of destiny. In that same pivotal second, Jann swung the crossbow to square with the officer’s mass, and reflexively squeezed the trigger. The bolt flew higher than he expected, transfixing the officer’s throat up to its fletch, necessarily shattering his spine, so that he fell gurgling back, spitting blood, his microwave pulser discharging, burning the air beside Jann’s head, singeing away a streak of hair from above his left ear. The startled tallie jumped to its upright stance, quivering with uncertainty.
There was a moment of shocked silence amongst the Kastillians—of gaping mouths and wide eyes.
Jann instinctively knew that moment of shocked surprise was his only hope. He shouted, “E’masta’shoon!” into his tallie’s ear and the beast, already primed to run, spun and leapt, coming down on its two feet in a full-out running crouch, sprinting for the fence threaded through the windbreak. The tallie had not taken four steps before stropps and pulsers fired at them, bullets to one side of Jann, energy bursts to another. The pulsers had a short range of effectiveness, and he felt his lower right side struck from the back, but already most of the force had been lost, and it merely blackened his jacket, seared his ribs.
He didn’t have to tell the tallie to jump the fence, it leapt the barrier easily, wailing its fear as it went, and weaved through the brush and into the open field beyond.
He felt a rush of relief, as the tallie bounded away—they weren’t likely to run him down on foot. If they knew how to ride tallies it would take them time to get them saddled and ready. He should be able to get away.
Well, after all he’d had provocation—the man had seemed about to shoot him. Had threatened to shoot him out of the saddle. The Peacekeepers would surely take his side.
There were shouted orders, away back behind him, and he heard a telltale droning sound—and with a plummeting heart Jann knew the Kastillians were mobilizing flyers to pursue him. So the ship was equipped for cross country surveillance—that in itself was suggestive that they were here for more than tallie rustling.
He couldn’t outdistance a flyer. He had killed their officer. What would they do when they caught him?
They were great ones for retaliation, the Kastillians. There was even a motto in ancient-Earth Latin, painted under the crest of the Galactic Scythe, on their warships, that translated to: Instantaneous Response to Insult. He hadn't figured his encounter with the Kastillians would come to violence. How had it gone so badly? Should have listened to Vonn…
His only hope was to get to the nearest manor, where there were men and weapons enough to defend him. His tallie was running headlong back toward its stables at the village, and Jann was forced to lash it with a saddle whip before it would correct and angle toward the Manor of Baron Dolliman Chesslander a Gollden.
Jann made it two-thirds the way there, before the flyers overtook him.
The ground exploded in front of him: dirt fountained up from the flyer’s stropp to spit rocks at his face, making the tallie shriek, almost falling over as it backpedaled. He shouted to get it under control and dug his heels into its ribs. “That way!”
He’d failed to say it in the training parlance but the tallie obeyed anyway, slanting off toward the south end of the Manor: a mansion built in two grand wings extending from a central cylinder capped by a milk-glass dome.
Jann chanced a look over his shoulder—there were two flyers, oval shapes studded with weapons in the prows, rocketing in narrowing circles overhead. One of them angled downward, and its onboard cannon coughed...
Another blast shattered stone and shrapnel to whine past. Jann bellowed commands into the terrified tallie’s ears, making it zig and zig again when the flyers anticipated a zag, riding in a tight circle before heading once more toward the Manor. A pulser bolt hummed past and a wooden fence post burst into flaming tinder to his left. They were using two kinds of weapon.
He leapt the tallie over the collapsing fence and now the beast was carrying him across the dark-green lawns, bounding through sprays of irrigation. A plasboard outbuilding exploded as he dodged the tallie around it, farm tools flying in flinders past him, and then they had reached the stables behind the manor. The Baron’s servants and yardmen were running past, shouting questions. He ignored them, riding the tallie into a stable and sliding off its back before it had quite come to a stop. The tallie collapsed then with a final whimper — and black blood from a shrapnel wound spread out in a pool from a wound in its chest.
Jann quelled an urge to try to thank the tallie for getting him here alive—there was no time for sentiment. He paused only to nock a bolt on his crossbow, then ran from the stable to the great house of Baron a Gollden.
He heard a muttering drone of flyers coming lower, perhaps landing, as he ran up to the back entrance of vaulted stone. The door opened just as he lifted his fist to pound on it, and a pop-eyed, white-haired man in livery blocked his way: the Majordomo. “Halt there, young Jann a Grelle! Why have you brought destruction to the property of your neighbors! This I demand of you!”
“How dare you speak to me like that, you oaf!” Jann shouted. He was a little ashamed of himself even as he said it, but his heart was pounding, his blood was up and he had no time for amenities. He elbowed his way past the Majordomo, pulled the sputtering old man into the manor, and barred the back door. Then he dodged through the kitchen, and sprinted down a narrow corridor to the vestibule at the front of the manor. He went to the front door and barred it.
Turning, Jann came face to face with the Baron—and above him, descending the spiral staircase past an imported hologram that replicated her image in an Eden-like idyll, was Liana. Both Golldens were small, compact people, but on the Baron Dolliman, it looked absurd, for his torso was too long for his short legs. The effect was unflatteringly exaggerated by his knee-shirt of lavender and turquoise, chased with images of Paradinian sea-slitherers; but his hair was his most prominent feature, falling over his shoulders in shining golden dyed ringlets, which he took great pains to keep colored despite his lined face and age-hooded blue eyes. It was said that the name Gollden related to an Old Earth word for the element.
Despite the urgency of the situation, Jann found himself staring at Liana. She seemed breathless, poised on the stairs there with her full lips parted, in her white shift, plain but for a single embroidered creeper-vine—something she wore for her Sisters of Nature meeting. The Sisters of Nature was a pseudo-druidic order in vogue with the upper classes.
“What the foul burnings are you doing, Jann a Grelle,” the little Baron bellowed, “staring at my daughter’s legs, panting in that vulgar way, when you’ve brought the lightning down on us! The damned Kastillians will be here in moments: this is a truth!”
“Ah--my Lord Baron—I’ve come to ask for sanctuary until we can deter these barbarians!”
“What? Sanctuary? You came to the wrong house!”
“My lord—surely you will not permit them to take me prisoner?”
Baron Dolliman a Gollden expertly pinched sneeze-Groak from a tiny pocket made for carrying just exactly that, flicked it into his nose, blinked, sneezed, and snorted—this last an opinion rather than a reaction.
Liana shook her golden head and spoke mournfully. “This morning I cast the Knuckles of Fortune, and burnt seven herbs for seeing, and seemed to see a betrayal of this house—but it’s not bearable when it comes to be!”
“He hasn’t betrayed me yet,” Jann said, looking at Baron Dolliman. “He can still call his men and take me to a storm room—the Kastillians may not know about the storm rooms...” For though the main continent of Paradine was famous for its mild weather, it was also subject to sudden violent storms, when behemoths went to ground and skypods were hurled through windows like cannonballs.
“No, Jann,” said Liana, “I meant your betrayal of us! You have made us look like enemies of the Kastillians!”
There was shouting outside the front door...
“Hear hear!” the Baron agreed. “The girl speaks sense! And it is too late for storm rooms, for I have been contacted by their commander, and I have agreed to give you over to his mercy: this I have.”
“What! But they ravaged your herds and would have stolen your Harvesters for slaves!”
“A few peasants I can sacrifice—but our lives must be protected, for no finer bloodline exists!” the Baron sniffed. “I have some proscribed technologies in the house—worth a great deal of money, some of them. Should the Kastillians see them they could confiscate them—my collection of holograms alone is worth millions!”
Jann gaped in disbelief. “But they may well kill me—or enslave me in living death!”
“Boy, did you not kill their Third Officer?”
“Self defense! He was about to shoot me down!”
The Baron lifted a dyed-blond eyebrow. “So you say. They say he was about to take you into custody.”
Feeling as if he’d been stabbed through the center of his soul, Jann looked up at Liana a Gollden. His face must have displayed his amazed hurt, because she looked away, pouting.
Jann looked at Gollden, who was walking with a purposeful air toward the front door. Could it be that Gollden knew more about the Kastillians' presence here? That he had been treating with them all along?
There was pounding on the door now—then the pounding ceased and there came a smell of burning.
“Now DemiLord of Grelle,” said the Baron, unlocking the front door, “Go out, and come not back. You have killed one of these Kastillians and to the Kastillians you must go!”
But just as he was about to open the door, the Baron stepped back in alarm as it began to smoke and glow, a patch of burn spreading out from the steady application of a pulser to the other side.
“Ho there, no need to destroy my door, I was unbarring it!” shouted the Baron Dolliman Chesslander a Gollden, to the men on the other side.
Muffled voices from outside. “Then unbolt and be quick about it or we’ll burn it down and smash through your windows for good measure!”
"I can't—the door is too hot, damn you!"
But Jann was already pounding up the stairs. Liana squealingly drew back from him, genuinely afraid. “Father! He’s going to take me hostage!”
Jann reached the second floor landing, and paused to see the Baron puffing up the stairs to his daughter’s side. The hologram running down the wall incorporated the Baron’s image, at his approach to the mural, so that there was an idyllic image of a perfect Baron a Gollden rushing to a queenly image of a his daughter in an Eden-like paradise. Jann called out to him, voice trembling, “Baron! I will not forget this treachery!”
He aimed the crossbow at the Baron’s midsection. His daughter shrieked and threw herself down on the stairs to be out of the line of fire. Then Jann grinned and turned the crossbow to the mural and fired, sending a bolt into the image of the Baron on the digital panel, so that the whole hologram flickered and sparked-- and went black.
The Baron howled at the cost. “That was an original Donni Bewtreck!”
Jann took another crossbow bolt from the quiver on his hip, nocked and fired it at the door just as a Kaswill stepped through—the Kaswill staggered as the bolt buried itself in his gut. The spacer screamed and fell to his knees, blocking the others for a few precious moments, as Jann pelted up two more flights of stairs to the roof-exit. He felt an unexpected pang of sympathy in his own belly—it was one thing to imagine shooting a man in the belly, another to do it.
Don't think about it, he told himself. This is life or death. Kill if you must.
Two seconds more and he was running on the circular walkway around the base of the pale crystal dome, the wind soughing—no, that was the sound of a flyer, rising up from the ground on the other side of the manor. They were going to come at him from above.
It seemed almost pointless for him to resist—there were more on the way from the ship, he could see them in the distance, and the place was surrounded. Where was he to go?
But driven by more desperation than hope, Jann jumped down onto the flat weather-scored roof of thin metal. There were a few skylights, which he knew to be of unbreakable glass, and chimneys, nothing more.
He ducked down as a flyer showed itself lifting over the dome, on the farther side. They hadn't seen him yet.
There must be some place to take cover…
~ end Chapter the First ~
Click Here for the beginning of Chapter the Second
of SKY PIRATES: Part 6
,
by John Shirley
Instinctively, he caught up the crossbow from the saddle hook. He gripped the weapon so it was ready to fire, though pointed at the ground.
“Have you not heard me, when I spoke my rank?” Jann said, trying to keep his voice even. “I am a DemiLord here. I am the only Heir to Grelle Manor! I have diplomatically called you my equal –so speak to me with the respect due me!”
“In no sense are you my equal, yokel,” the officer said loudly, showing off for the others. “You are not even the equal of the boy who cleans the crew toilets.” There was a roar of approving laughter from his men. “Now drop that primitive weapon, and get down off that foul smelling beast—washed and gutted, it will make a fine meal for our Autocrats! Then you can go crawling back to your manor—and when I say crawl, I mean crawl!” His crew laughed at that.
Jann would surrender his tallie to no man; he would crawl for no man. He flicked the safety off his crossbow, which automatically triggered a spring that drew the arrow to readiness.
The officer noticed the tightening of the bowstring, the readiness of the bolt—his eyes narrowed and he visibly tensed.
Jann's mouth went dry…
The officer said, “Boy—you get down off that beast... or I’ll knock you off it.”
And the officer drew his side arm. This he did by thrusting his whole hand into its wrist-engager, which gripped his arm even as he snapped the pulser up from its holster to aim at Jann, fingers closing over the three-finger trigger—
These things Jann saw in an instant of slowed time, in which the officer's actions seemed the inexorable working of the machinery of destiny. In that same pivotal second, Jann swung the crossbow to square with the officer’s mass, and reflexively squeezed the trigger. The bolt flew higher than he expected, transfixing the officer’s throat up to its fletch, necessarily shattering his spine, so that he fell gurgling back, spitting blood, his microwave pulser discharging, burning the air beside Jann’s head, singeing away a streak of hair from above his left ear. The startled tallie jumped to its upright stance, quivering with uncertainty.
There was a moment of shocked silence amongst the Kastillians—of gaping mouths and wide eyes.
Jann instinctively knew that moment of shocked surprise was his only hope. He shouted, “E’masta’shoon!” into his tallie’s ear and the beast, already primed to run, spun and leapt, coming down on its two feet in a full-out running crouch, sprinting for the fence threaded through the windbreak. The tallie had not taken four steps before stropps and pulsers fired at them, bullets to one side of Jann, energy bursts to another. The pulsers had a short range of effectiveness, and he felt his lower right side struck from the back, but already most of the force had been lost, and it merely blackened his jacket, seared his ribs.
He didn’t have to tell the tallie to jump the fence, it leapt the barrier easily, wailing its fear as it went, and weaved through the brush and into the open field beyond.
He felt a rush of relief, as the tallie bounded away—they weren’t likely to run him down on foot. If they knew how to ride tallies it would take them time to get them saddled and ready. He should be able to get away.
Well, after all he’d had provocation—the man had seemed about to shoot him. Had threatened to shoot him out of the saddle. The Peacekeepers would surely take his side.
There were shouted orders, away back behind him, and he heard a telltale droning sound—and with a plummeting heart Jann knew the Kastillians were mobilizing flyers to pursue him. So the ship was equipped for cross country surveillance—that in itself was suggestive that they were here for more than tallie rustling.
He couldn’t outdistance a flyer. He had killed their officer. What would they do when they caught him?
They were great ones for retaliation, the Kastillians. There was even a motto in ancient-Earth Latin, painted under the crest of the Galactic Scythe, on their warships, that translated to: Instantaneous Response to Insult. He hadn't figured his encounter with the Kastillians would come to violence. How had it gone so badly? Should have listened to Vonn…
His only hope was to get to the nearest manor, where there were men and weapons enough to defend him. His tallie was running headlong back toward its stables at the village, and Jann was forced to lash it with a saddle whip before it would correct and angle toward the Manor of Baron Dolliman Chesslander a Gollden.
Jann made it two-thirds the way there, before the flyers overtook him.
The ground exploded in front of him: dirt fountained up from the flyer’s stropp to spit rocks at his face, making the tallie shriek, almost falling over as it backpedaled. He shouted to get it under control and dug his heels into its ribs. “That way!”
He’d failed to say it in the training parlance but the tallie obeyed anyway, slanting off toward the south end of the Manor: a mansion built in two grand wings extending from a central cylinder capped by a milk-glass dome.
Jann chanced a look over his shoulder—there were two flyers, oval shapes studded with weapons in the prows, rocketing in narrowing circles overhead. One of them angled downward, and its onboard cannon coughed...
Another blast shattered stone and shrapnel to whine past. Jann bellowed commands into the terrified tallie’s ears, making it zig and zig again when the flyers anticipated a zag, riding in a tight circle before heading once more toward the Manor. A pulser bolt hummed past and a wooden fence post burst into flaming tinder to his left. They were using two kinds of weapon.
He leapt the tallie over the collapsing fence and now the beast was carrying him across the dark-green lawns, bounding through sprays of irrigation. A plasboard outbuilding exploded as he dodged the tallie around it, farm tools flying in flinders past him, and then they had reached the stables behind the manor. The Baron’s servants and yardmen were running past, shouting questions. He ignored them, riding the tallie into a stable and sliding off its back before it had quite come to a stop. The tallie collapsed then with a final whimper — and black blood from a shrapnel wound spread out in a pool from a wound in its chest.
Jann quelled an urge to try to thank the tallie for getting him here alive—there was no time for sentiment. He paused only to nock a bolt on his crossbow, then ran from the stable to the great house of Baron a Gollden.
He heard a muttering drone of flyers coming lower, perhaps landing, as he ran up to the back entrance of vaulted stone. The door opened just as he lifted his fist to pound on it, and a pop-eyed, white-haired man in livery blocked his way: the Majordomo. “Halt there, young Jann a Grelle! Why have you brought destruction to the property of your neighbors! This I demand of you!”
“How dare you speak to me like that, you oaf!” Jann shouted. He was a little ashamed of himself even as he said it, but his heart was pounding, his blood was up and he had no time for amenities. He elbowed his way past the Majordomo, pulled the sputtering old man into the manor, and barred the back door. Then he dodged through the kitchen, and sprinted down a narrow corridor to the vestibule at the front of the manor. He went to the front door and barred it.
Turning, Jann came face to face with the Baron—and above him, descending the spiral staircase past an imported hologram that replicated her image in an Eden-like idyll, was Liana. Both Golldens were small, compact people, but on the Baron Dolliman, it looked absurd, for his torso was too long for his short legs. The effect was unflatteringly exaggerated by his knee-shirt of lavender and turquoise, chased with images of Paradinian sea-slitherers; but his hair was his most prominent feature, falling over his shoulders in shining golden dyed ringlets, which he took great pains to keep colored despite his lined face and age-hooded blue eyes. It was said that the name Gollden related to an Old Earth word for the element.
Despite the urgency of the situation, Jann found himself staring at Liana. She seemed breathless, poised on the stairs there with her full lips parted, in her white shift, plain but for a single embroidered creeper-vine—something she wore for her Sisters of Nature meeting. The Sisters of Nature was a pseudo-druidic order in vogue with the upper classes.
“What the foul burnings are you doing, Jann a Grelle,” the little Baron bellowed, “staring at my daughter’s legs, panting in that vulgar way, when you’ve brought the lightning down on us! The damned Kastillians will be here in moments: this is a truth!”
“Ah--my Lord Baron—I’ve come to ask for sanctuary until we can deter these barbarians!”
“What? Sanctuary? You came to the wrong house!”
“My lord—surely you will not permit them to take me prisoner?”
Baron Dolliman a Gollden expertly pinched sneeze-Groak from a tiny pocket made for carrying just exactly that, flicked it into his nose, blinked, sneezed, and snorted—this last an opinion rather than a reaction.
Liana shook her golden head and spoke mournfully. “This morning I cast the Knuckles of Fortune, and burnt seven herbs for seeing, and seemed to see a betrayal of this house—but it’s not bearable when it comes to be!”
“He hasn’t betrayed me yet,” Jann said, looking at Baron Dolliman. “He can still call his men and take me to a storm room—the Kastillians may not know about the storm rooms...” For though the main continent of Paradine was famous for its mild weather, it was also subject to sudden violent storms, when behemoths went to ground and skypods were hurled through windows like cannonballs.
“No, Jann,” said Liana, “I meant your betrayal of us! You have made us look like enemies of the Kastillians!”
There was shouting outside the front door...
“Hear hear!” the Baron agreed. “The girl speaks sense! And it is too late for storm rooms, for I have been contacted by their commander, and I have agreed to give you over to his mercy: this I have.”
“What! But they ravaged your herds and would have stolen your Harvesters for slaves!”
“A few peasants I can sacrifice—but our lives must be protected, for no finer bloodline exists!” the Baron sniffed. “I have some proscribed technologies in the house—worth a great deal of money, some of them. Should the Kastillians see them they could confiscate them—my collection of holograms alone is worth millions!”
Jann gaped in disbelief. “But they may well kill me—or enslave me in living death!”
“Boy, did you not kill their Third Officer?”
“Self defense! He was about to shoot me down!”
The Baron lifted a dyed-blond eyebrow. “So you say. They say he was about to take you into custody.”
Feeling as if he’d been stabbed through the center of his soul, Jann looked up at Liana a Gollden. His face must have displayed his amazed hurt, because she looked away, pouting.
Jann looked at Gollden, who was walking with a purposeful air toward the front door. Could it be that Gollden knew more about the Kastillians' presence here? That he had been treating with them all along?
There was pounding on the door now—then the pounding ceased and there came a smell of burning.
“Now DemiLord of Grelle,” said the Baron, unlocking the front door, “Go out, and come not back. You have killed one of these Kastillians and to the Kastillians you must go!”
But just as he was about to open the door, the Baron stepped back in alarm as it began to smoke and glow, a patch of burn spreading out from the steady application of a pulser to the other side.
“Ho there, no need to destroy my door, I was unbarring it!” shouted the Baron Dolliman Chesslander a Gollden, to the men on the other side.
Muffled voices from outside. “Then unbolt and be quick about it or we’ll burn it down and smash through your windows for good measure!”
"I can't—the door is too hot, damn you!"
But Jann was already pounding up the stairs. Liana squealingly drew back from him, genuinely afraid. “Father! He’s going to take me hostage!”
Jann reached the second floor landing, and paused to see the Baron puffing up the stairs to his daughter’s side. The hologram running down the wall incorporated the Baron’s image, at his approach to the mural, so that there was an idyllic image of a perfect Baron a Gollden rushing to a queenly image of a his daughter in an Eden-like paradise. Jann called out to him, voice trembling, “Baron! I will not forget this treachery!”
He aimed the crossbow at the Baron’s midsection. His daughter shrieked and threw herself down on the stairs to be out of the line of fire. Then Jann grinned and turned the crossbow to the mural and fired, sending a bolt into the image of the Baron on the digital panel, so that the whole hologram flickered and sparked-- and went black.
The Baron howled at the cost. “That was an original Donni Bewtreck!”
Jann took another crossbow bolt from the quiver on his hip, nocked and fired it at the door just as a Kaswill stepped through—the Kaswill staggered as the bolt buried itself in his gut. The spacer screamed and fell to his knees, blocking the others for a few precious moments, as Jann pelted up two more flights of stairs to the roof-exit. He felt an unexpected pang of sympathy in his own belly—it was one thing to imagine shooting a man in the belly, another to do it.
Don't think about it, he told himself. This is life or death. Kill if you must.
Two seconds more and he was running on the circular walkway around the base of the pale crystal dome, the wind soughing—no, that was the sound of a flyer, rising up from the ground on the other side of the manor. They were going to come at him from above.
It seemed almost pointless for him to resist—there were more on the way from the ship, he could see them in the distance, and the place was surrounded. Where was he to go?
But driven by more desperation than hope, Jann jumped down onto the flat weather-scored roof of thin metal. There were a few skylights, which he knew to be of unbreakable glass, and chimneys, nothing more.
He ducked down as a flyer showed itself lifting over the dome, on the farther side. They hadn't seen him yet.
There must be some place to take cover…
~ end Chapter the First ~
Click Here for the beginning of Chapter the Second
of SKY PIRATES: Part 6
,
by John Shirley
Friday, July 10, 2009
NIGHT FLAMERS
by johnny strike
A dazed, short, fat man with a buzz cut stood in the street, waving a handgun. He turned and fired a shot into the empty doorway of an apartment complex. The gunman then crossed the street and disappeared into the doorway.
A white 1956 Oldsmobile rolled along California Street, using the last of its gas. The cars it passed in the street were all empty. A tour bus and an ersatz cable car, empty as well, stood near the entrance of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The front tires of the Oldsmobile just made it onto the red brick forecourt of the hotel as the car died.
Two people got out. The driver, Dr. Rodriguez from Buenos Aires, had originally come to California to attend a convention on life extension and present his paper on the results of a study of 17 spider monkeys treated with a synthesis of longevity drugs. The passenger, Rita, a striking Korean beauty and a professional escort and masseuse, had been with the doctor at his hotel at the time of The Invasion. They were among the few thousand who had escaped from Los Angeles. At a hundred miles per hour, they had raced past blackened ruins; the horrible images still remained in their unsettled minds.
In San Francisco, they had seen only one other person: a snarling woman dressed and made up as a clown. Rita had gestured wildly and yelled to her, but the angry clown had run off and disappeared behind a mound of burning debris.
With furrowed brows, Dr. Rodriguez watched Rita walk through the revolving glass door into the lobby of the Mark. Upstairs, they found an open suite and Rita collapsed onto the bed. The doctor looked at the back of her bare thighs and for a moment wanted to caress her. His mind was still racing. He looked at the phone on the night stand; he knew it was dead. He sat on a beige velvet couch and tried the TV remote. Dead, of course. Unable to sleep, Rita moaned, got up, and looked through the closets, where she found pieces of a woman’s wardrobe. In the bathroom, she had a sponge bath, using the water she found in a pitcher. She tried on an elegant silver evening gown. Expressionless, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She lit a cigarette. She wondered if she was losing her mind.
Night fell, and an all-encompassing blackness blotted out the city. Dr. Rodriguez and Rita sat by the window, looking out at the sky. They watched a dirigible passing above the Transamerica Building like an enormous, slow, gray bullet. A detachment of soldiers parachuted down to the streets. Lights were attached to their helmets. Their eyes were partially hidden behind tinted wraparounds. Rita felt as if she was watching a deranged, speeded-up film as the soldiers began their methodical search.
In a back yard behind a modest house was a small, black terrier named TJ. The dog was looking wildly at a deep crater. A minute earlier, he had witnessed something emerge from it that had stilled his usually persistent bark. The head had resembled the skull of some extinct denizen of the deep. A pulsing green membrane had run down from its thick neck, circling its dully-gleaming torso. The thing had emitted an ear-splitting screech that had had drowned out TJ’s growl, then it had burst into the sky. The dog ran yelping back into the house. The occupants, his owners, had vanished two days prior. The dog whimpered, lay back down, and continued to wait.
The next morning, TJ, following his instinct, ran off down the empty streets. He stopped at an old house where the garage door was open. The dog smelled food cooking somewhere nearby. Cautiously, he looked in. There stood a little girl who squealed with delight at seeing him, but he ran off in fright. TJ was seeking someone more like his previous masters. He stayed hidden while the girl called out, "Here, doggy. Here, doggy."
A while later, the little girl and two other diminutive people came out of the garage and shut the door behind them. Like the little girl, they, too, were deeply tanned, wore blonde wigs and had white lips. All three wore small backpacks and each carried a little rifle. With anxious brown eyes, TJ watched them walk down the snow-covered street and disappear around a corner.
TJ made his way around to the back of the house and sniffed at the air. He saw two old men sitting on a porch swing, wearing party hats, embracing. The men saw the dog, disengaged, and began inviting him, coaxing him, to approach. TJ wagged his tail and gradually went up onto the porch. One man went inside and came back with a dish of unfamiliar food and a bowl of water. TJ lapped greedily at the water with his small red tongue. As the dog drank, he became aware of an enormous shadow approaching. A loud humming sound came from above and one of the men snatched him up protectively and they all rushed inside.
Freak weather conditions came next. A relentless hot wind from some infernal place was followed by a dusting of pale, yellow snow. The sky was filled with static and, to some of the remaining survivors, the dark clouds began to form faces.
Click Here for Part 5 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
A dazed, short, fat man with a buzz cut stood in the street, waving a handgun. He turned and fired a shot into the empty doorway of an apartment complex. The gunman then crossed the street and disappeared into the doorway.
A white 1956 Oldsmobile rolled along California Street, using the last of its gas. The cars it passed in the street were all empty. A tour bus and an ersatz cable car, empty as well, stood near the entrance of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The front tires of the Oldsmobile just made it onto the red brick forecourt of the hotel as the car died.
Two people got out. The driver, Dr. Rodriguez from Buenos Aires, had originally come to California to attend a convention on life extension and present his paper on the results of a study of 17 spider monkeys treated with a synthesis of longevity drugs. The passenger, Rita, a striking Korean beauty and a professional escort and masseuse, had been with the doctor at his hotel at the time of The Invasion. They were among the few thousand who had escaped from Los Angeles. At a hundred miles per hour, they had raced past blackened ruins; the horrible images still remained in their unsettled minds.
In San Francisco, they had seen only one other person: a snarling woman dressed and made up as a clown. Rita had gestured wildly and yelled to her, but the angry clown had run off and disappeared behind a mound of burning debris.
With furrowed brows, Dr. Rodriguez watched Rita walk through the revolving glass door into the lobby of the Mark. Upstairs, they found an open suite and Rita collapsed onto the bed. The doctor looked at the back of her bare thighs and for a moment wanted to caress her. His mind was still racing. He looked at the phone on the night stand; he knew it was dead. He sat on a beige velvet couch and tried the TV remote. Dead, of course. Unable to sleep, Rita moaned, got up, and looked through the closets, where she found pieces of a woman’s wardrobe. In the bathroom, she had a sponge bath, using the water she found in a pitcher. She tried on an elegant silver evening gown. Expressionless, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She lit a cigarette. She wondered if she was losing her mind.
Night fell, and an all-encompassing blackness blotted out the city. Dr. Rodriguez and Rita sat by the window, looking out at the sky. They watched a dirigible passing above the Transamerica Building like an enormous, slow, gray bullet. A detachment of soldiers parachuted down to the streets. Lights were attached to their helmets. Their eyes were partially hidden behind tinted wraparounds. Rita felt as if she was watching a deranged, speeded-up film as the soldiers began their methodical search.
In a back yard behind a modest house was a small, black terrier named TJ. The dog was looking wildly at a deep crater. A minute earlier, he had witnessed something emerge from it that had stilled his usually persistent bark. The head had resembled the skull of some extinct denizen of the deep. A pulsing green membrane had run down from its thick neck, circling its dully-gleaming torso. The thing had emitted an ear-splitting screech that had had drowned out TJ’s growl, then it had burst into the sky. The dog ran yelping back into the house. The occupants, his owners, had vanished two days prior. The dog whimpered, lay back down, and continued to wait.
The next morning, TJ, following his instinct, ran off down the empty streets. He stopped at an old house where the garage door was open. The dog smelled food cooking somewhere nearby. Cautiously, he looked in. There stood a little girl who squealed with delight at seeing him, but he ran off in fright. TJ was seeking someone more like his previous masters. He stayed hidden while the girl called out, "Here, doggy. Here, doggy."
A while later, the little girl and two other diminutive people came out of the garage and shut the door behind them. Like the little girl, they, too, were deeply tanned, wore blonde wigs and had white lips. All three wore small backpacks and each carried a little rifle. With anxious brown eyes, TJ watched them walk down the snow-covered street and disappear around a corner.
TJ made his way around to the back of the house and sniffed at the air. He saw two old men sitting on a porch swing, wearing party hats, embracing. The men saw the dog, disengaged, and began inviting him, coaxing him, to approach. TJ wagged his tail and gradually went up onto the porch. One man went inside and came back with a dish of unfamiliar food and a bowl of water. TJ lapped greedily at the water with his small red tongue. As the dog drank, he became aware of an enormous shadow approaching. A loud humming sound came from above and one of the men snatched him up protectively and they all rushed inside.
Freak weather conditions came next. A relentless hot wind from some infernal place was followed by a dusting of pale, yellow snow. The sky was filled with static and, to some of the remaining survivors, the dark clouds began to form faces.
Click Here for Part 5 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
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Archive of Stories
and Authors
Callum Leckie's
THE DIGITAL DECADENT
J.R. Torina's
ANTHROPOPHAGUS
house ('90-'97), runs Sutekh Productions
(an industrial-ambient music label) and
Slaughterhouse Records (metal record
label), and was proprietor of The Abyss
(a metal-gothic-industrial c.d. shop in
SLC, now closed). He is the dark force
behind Scapegoat (an ambient-tribal-
noise-experimental unit). THE HOUSE
IN THE PORT is his first publication.
Sean Padlo's
NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW
Sean Padlo's
GRANDPA'S LAST REQUEST
Sean Padlo's exact whereabouts
are never able to be fully
pinned down, but what we
do know about him is laced
with the echoes of legend.
He's already been known
to haunt certain areas of
the landscape, a trick said
to only be possible by being
able to manipulate it from
the future. His presence
among the rest of us here
at the freezine sends shivers
of wonder deep in our solar plexus.
Morris's HOW THE GODS KILL
Konstantine Paradias's
Adam Bolivar's
Daniel José Older's
Paul Stuart's
SEA?TV!
Paul Stuart is the author of numerous
G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD
G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
SACRI-FEES
Konstantine Paradias is a writer by
choice. At the moment, he's published
over 100 stories in English, Japanese,
Romanian, German, Dutch and
Portuguese and has worked in a free-
lancing capacity for videogames, screen-
plays and anthologies. People tell him
he's got a writing problem but he can,
like, quit whenever he wants, man.
His work has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize.
Edward Morris's
ONE NIGHT IN MANHATTAN
Edward Morris's
MERCY STREET
Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for
the Pushcart Prize in literature, has
also been nominated for the 2009
Rhysling Award and the 2005 British
Science Fiction Association Award.
His short stories have been published
over a hundred and twenty times in
four languages, most recently at
PerhihelionSF, the Red Penny Papers'
SUPERPOW! anthology, and The
Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. He lives
and works in Portland as a writer,
editor, spoken word MC and bouncer,
and is also a regular guest author at
the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
Tim Fezz's
BURNT WEENY SANDWICH
Tim Fezz's
MANY SILVERED MOONS AGO
Tim Fezz hails out of the shattered
streets of Philly destroying the air-
waves and people's minds in the
underground with his band OLD
FEZZIWIG. He's been known to
dip his razor quill into his own
blood and pen a twisted tale
every now and again. We are
delighted to have him onboard
the FREEZINE and we hope
you are, too.
Daniel E. Lambert's
DEAD CLOWN AND MAGNET HEAD
Daniel E. Lambert teaches English
at California State University, Los
Angeles and East Los Angeles College.
He also teaches online Literature
courses for Colorado Technical
University. His writing appears
in Silver Apples, Easy Reader,
Other Worlds, Wrapped in Plastic
and The Daily Breeze. His work
also appears in the anthologies
When Words Collide, Flash It,
Daily Flash 2012, Daily Frights
2012, An Island of Egrets and
Timeless Voices. His collection
of poetry and prose, Love and
Other Diversions, is available
through Amazon. He lives in
Southern California with his
wife, poet and author Anhthao Bui.
Phoenix's
AGAIN AND AGAIN
Phoenix has enjoyed writing since he
was a little kid. He finds much import-
ance and truth in creative expression.
Phoenix has written over sixty books,
and has published everything from
novels, to poetry and philosophy.
He hopes to inspire people with his
writing and to ask difficult questions
about our world and the universe.
Phoenix lives in Salt Lake City, Utah,
where he spends much of his time
reading books on science, philosophy,
and literature. He spends a good deal
of his free time writing and working
on new books. The Freezine of Fant-
asy and Science Fiction welcomes him
and his unique, intense vision.
Discover Phoenix's books at his author
page on Amazon. Also check out his blog.
Adam Bolivar's
SERVITORS OF THE
OUTER DARKNESS
Adam Bolivar's
THE DEVIL & SIR
FRANCIS DRAKE
THE TIME-EATER
Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
who has lived in New Orleans and Berkeley,
and currently resides in Portland, Oregon
with his beloved wife and fluffy gray cat
Dahlia. Adam wears round, antique glasses
and has a fondness for hats. His greatest
inspirations include H.P. Lovecraft,
Jack tales and coffee. He has been
a Romantic poet for as long as any-
one can remember, specializing in
the composition of spectral balladry,
utilizing to great effect a traditional
poetic form that taps into the haunted
undercurrents of folklore seldom found
in other forms of writing.
His poetry has appeared on the pages
of such publications as SPECTRAL
REALMS and BLACK WINGS OF
CTHULHU, and a poem of his,
"The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner,"
won the Rhysling Award for long-form
poetry. His collection of weird balladry
and Jack tales, THE LAY OF OLD HEX,
was published by Hippocampus Press in 2017.
Sanford Meschkow's
INEVITABLE
Sanford Meschkow is a retired former
NYer who married a Philly suburban
Main Line girl. Sanford has been pub-
lished in a 1970s issue of AMAZING.
We welcome him here on the FREE-
ZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Owen R. Powell's
NOETIC VACATIONS
Little is known of the mysterious
Owen R. Powell (oftentimes referred
to as Orp online). That is because he
usually keeps moving. The story
Noetic Vacations marks his first
appearance in the Freezine.
Gene Stewart
(writing as Art Wester)
GROUND PORK
Gene Stewart's
CRYPTID'S LAIR
Gene Stewart is a writer and artist.
He currently lives in the Midwest
American Wilderness where he is
researching tales of mystical realism,
writing ficta mystica, and exploring
the dark by casting a little light into
the shadows. Follow this link to his
website where there are many samples
of his writing and much else; come
explore.
Daniel José Older's
GRAVEYARD WALTZ
Daniel José Older's
THE COLLECTOR
Daniel José Older's
THE COLLECTOR
Daniel José Older's spiritually driven,
urban storytelling takes root at the
crossroads of myth and history.
With sardonic, uplifting and often
hilarious prose, Older draws from
his work as an overnight 911 paramedic,
a teaching artist & an antiracist/antisexist
organizer to weave fast-moving, emotionally
engaging plots that speak whispers and
shouts about power and privilege in
modern day New York City. His work
has appeared in the Freezine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, The ShadowCast
Audio Anthology, The Tide Pool, and
the collection Sunshine/Noir, and is
featured in Sheree Renee Thomas'
Black Pot Mojo Reading Series in Harlem.
When he's not writing, teaching or
riding around in an ambulance,
Daniel can be found performing with
his Brooklyn-based soul quartet
Ghost Star. His blog about the
ridiculous and disturbing world
of EMS can be found here.
Paul Stuart's
SEA?TV!
Paul Stuart is the author of numerous
biographical blurbs written in the third
person. His previously published fiction
appears in The Vault of Punk Horror and
His non-fiction financial pieces can be found
in a shiny, west-coast magazine that features
pictures of expensive homes, as well as images
of women in casual poses and their accessories.
Consider writing him at paul@twilightlane.com,
if you'd like some thing from his garage. In fall
2010, look for Grade 12 Trigonometry and
Pre-Calculus -With Zombies.
Rain Grave's
MAU BAST
Rain Graves is an award winning
Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
with LIPSTICK
BLAG DAHLIA is a Rock Legend.
Rain Grave's
MAU BAST
Rain Graves is an award winning
author of horror, science fiction and
poetry. She is best known for the 2002
Bram Stoker Award winner for Best
Poetry Collection, The Gossamer Eye
(along with Mark McLaughlin and
David Niall Wilson). Her most
recent book, Barfodder: Poetry
Written in Dark Bars and Questionable
Cafes, has been hailed by Publisher's
Weekly as "Bukowski meets Lovecraft..."
in January of 2009. She lives and
writes in San Francisco, performing
spoken word at events around the
country. 877-DRK-POEM -
Listen. http://raingraves.com/
Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
with LIPSTICK
BLAG DAHLIA is a Rock Legend.
Singer, Songwriter, producer &
founder of the notorious DWARVES.
He has written two novels, ‘NINA’ and
‘ARMED to the TEETH with LIPSTICK’.
G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD
G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
in high school, and received a creative
writing scholarship for the effort. Soon
afterward he discovered that words were
not enough, and left for art school. He was
awarded the Emeritus Fellowship along
with his BFA from Memphis College of Art
in '94, and entered the videogame industry
as a team leader and 3D artist. He has over
25 published games to his credit. Mr. Davis
is a Burningman participant of 14 years,
and he swings a mean sword in the SCA.
He's also the best friend I ever had. He
was taken away from us last year on Jan
25 and I'll never be able to understand why.
Together we were a fantastic duo, the
legendary Grub Bros. Our secret base
exists on a cross-hatched nexus between
the Year of the Dragon and Dark City.
Somewhere along the tectonic fault
lines of our electromagnetic gathering,
shades of us peel off from the coruscating
pillars and are dropped back into the mix.
The phrase "rest in peace" just bugs me.
I'd rather think that Greg Grub's inimitable
spirit somehow continues evolving along
another manifestation of light itself, a
purple shift shall we say into another
phase of our expanding universe. I
ask myself, is it wishful thinking?
Will we really shed our human skin
like a discarded chrysalis and emerge
shimmering on another wavelength
altogether--or even manifest right
here among the rest without their
even beginning to suspect it? Well
people do believe in ghosts, but I
myself have long been suspicious
there can only be one single ghost
and that's all the stars in the universe
shrinking away into a withering heart
glittering and winking at us like
lost diamonds still echoing all their
sad and lonely songs fallen on deaf
eyes and ears blind to their colorful
emanations. My grub brother always
knew better than what the limits
of this old world taught him. We
explored past the outer peripheries
of our comfort zones to awaken
the terror in our minds and keep
us on our toes deep in the forest
in the middle of the night. The owls
led our way and the wilderness
transformed into a sanctuary.
The adventures we shared together
will always remain tattooed on
the pages of my skin. They tell a
story that we began together and
which continues being woven to
this very day. It's the same old
story about how we all were in
this together and how each and
every one of us is also going away
someday and though it will be the far-
thest we can manage to tell our own
tale we may rest assured it will be
continued like one of the old pulp
serials by all our friends which survive
us and manage to continue
the saga whispering in the wind.
Shae Sveniker's
A NEW METAPHYSICAL STUDY
REGARDING THE BEHAVIOR
OF PLANT LIFE
Shae is a poet/artist/student and former
A NEW METAPHYSICAL STUDY
REGARDING THE BEHAVIOR
OF PLANT LIFE
Shae is a poet/artist/student and former
resident of the Salt Pit, UT, currently living
in Simi Valley, CA. His short stories are on
Blogger and his poetry is hosted on Livejournal.
Nigel Strange's
PLASTIC CHILDREN
Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
PLASTIC CHILDREN
Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
daughter, cats, and tiny dog-like thing
in their home in California where he
occasionally experiments recreationally
with lucidity. PLASTIC CHILDREN
is his first publication.