Chapter 8 — Beyond the Report (ANCIENT)
Ahi Hakatan, I regret few things in life, such is the way of the Master that regret is as a charge against his power to restore. Still, there are the moments when I wish, for the sake of my own comfort, the sake of my own pride, and the sake of my own hopes, that I had not yielded Sarai and my children to the arrest. Yet to see a man destroyed by my own hand, to witness the fear and hatred in his eye – I could not bear to think of what it may cost.
I watched upward as the float rose to the ship and blinked against the blinding sun. I tried to reach again to the power, but it did not come. I could not go to them.
“Cuff yourself.” A pair of electromagnetic cuffs were thrown at my front. I heard anger in that voice, and perhaps relief, though my memory might be faulty.
I took a deep breath of the air that should have killed me. I praised the Master and pleaded even as I tore my eyes from the floating platform where all my worldly love stood. The cuffs felt strangely light. I had once, only once, taken a captive in a deployment to an ursa minor asteroid where a young man, perhaps eight by martian reckoning had hidden himself in the hollows of a space bridge we were building. He was siphoning power from our systems to keep himself alive in an old magsuit which was much too large for him.
I was too harsh with him then, I think. I lay the backs of my hands in the cuffs and breathed again before speaking just as the officer tapped the locking mechanism with his magnetic key, “Have you any clothing?”
His blank black faceshield mirrored back my own face at me. I was taken aback by my own image. The gray of my beard had turned jet black. The hard lines of my forehead smoothed. The corners of my eyes bore no smile lines.
“We’ll get you something on the ship, legionary. You have no rights before the conclave, no recourse to protections in the murder of a fellow legionary, yet you may make the plea of mercy.” His voice was static, cold.
“I submit the rule of the conclave and will make the pleas. What of my family?”
“It is not for me to decide. They will not be harmed. The conclave has no reason to do so.”
“His name?” I asked.
The man’s face was shrouded but his body physically tensed, hand clenching. His sigh came strangely through the outboard mic, “Byron Bravost, Specialist.”
The man nodded and the two other legionaries behind me stepped forward but stopped.
“On your feet, legionary.”
I stood. Taller than any of them by half a head and looked up at the ship, hearing its droning, pulsing whine. “To the Waypoint of Eos?”
“Just so, legionary.”
The man turned away and pulled a sphere from his pocket, moving to the position where my family had been taken up.
I laughed, and I felt all three men tense, and out of the corner of my eye one even shifted his finger to his pulse rifle’s trigger.
“Who did this?” I asked to the strange sky, and now all three stopped.
The officer swung on me and stepped forward, his faceshield to my face and whispered, “You don’t know?”
I shook my head and the weight of what was happening, which had been stalking the back of my psyche through the whole of the morning pounced. Faces flashed through my mind, laughter, joy, pain, funerals, weddings, feasts, marching, training. Jonas’ – my second – smiled sadly at me, his wife and daughter dancing on a nearby stage as music filled the wedding hall. My men and their families, almost everyone I had known and loved for over a decade. Gone.
My breath caught in my throat, and I teetered. My legs seized, my chest spasmed. I grasped it with both hands, connected by the cuffs. A woeful scream tore from my lips with a ravening hunger to escape, and I collapsed to my knees and wept.
I imagine the men were surprised. We know not how to comfort the grieving in the throes of it. I choked and gasped and wailed, pounding the dust beneath me with both hands and clenched fists. All my calm had fled. It was too much, but I felt a flicker of the flame at my cheek. I heard sounds of surprise as I lifted my hands from the dirt and set the back of a hand to my cheek. A comfort washed over me and my breathing steadied. I lifted my head, and licked salt from my lips.
“Get up!”
I stumbled to my feet, fighting back my gasps. I set my jaw hard against the pain and thought of what I yet had held – Sarai and Devon and Daria. I forced a smile and stepped onto the float platform and was taken upward into the belly of the ship.
The bright light from within the ship shrouded my vision until we passed the barrier and suddenly my vision snapped into place. Daria was huddled gripping her mother’s skirt with another man guarding them. Devon stood nearby, glaring at a K-9 unit that titled its head, sniffed him, then licked him across the face. Sarai stepped forward and hugged me, then screamed as she was pulled away roughly.
Anger filled me again and flames flared as I shouted at the man who had grabbed her, “stay your hand or lose it!”
He raised his hands and stepped back from her. His eyes were wide with a fresh fear, but he wasn’t looking at me. I turned and saw that a flame had begun working its way over their leader. I looked down at my hands again and tried to will the flames to cease, but they continued eating their way through my shackles with delighted popping noises.
“Cap! Put it out!” A voice shouted, and I turned again. The man’s pulsefire sidearm was at aimed directly at me. His hand was shaking. As he looked back and forth from me to the captain. The K-9 unit barked twice then cowered, huddling itself into a small corner as a small flame wreathed Devon as well. The man who now bore the flame next to me was hunched over as if in pain, but made no sound.
“Calm down, Telestrius.” The man’s voice was a mixture of the microphone, burning away as his suit disappeared, and the subtle tones of a young man who had known command.
A side door in the cargo hold opened and a taller, thin man with a jovial demeanor entered and stopped, “What in the?”
The man addressed as Telestrius yelled, “We’re under attack, Kel.”
“I can’t control it!” I yelled, though it certainly meant nothing.
The man called Kel scrambled for a weapon behind the door, and I shouted “No!” as he swung it up in my direction, but Sarai was between us.
I heard the blast then felt a growingly familiar flash as I transported my body directly between Sarai and the bolt. It struck me high in the right thigh, tearing away a large part of my leg and driving me to a knee. Despite the damage, I felt nothing. I turned back toward Sarai, terror gripping me, but she was unhurt. The bolt had passed around her and struck a portion of the magseal around the edge of the ship, dissipating into waves of harmless energy restored back to the ship.
“Cease Fire NOW!” the Captain’s voice compelled a quiet over the room.
“Ori, Ori, You are…” Sarai’s voice quivered as she set her hands to my wound which bled anywhere the bolt did not cauterize the flesh.
I raised my hand to her face and smiled, “This body for a shield, my love.” I used my thumb to wipe away a tear, and she started to speak but was interrupted.
“On your feet!” The man Telestrius was still shaking, his sidearm aimed at the low-ready. He shifted his gaze and feet back and forth.
The one called Kel came forward but did not touch me. “I’m sorry, mate. Dammit. I’m sorry. Just don’t move.”
“Get back you rotten little piece of filth,” Sarai hissed at him and moved her body around me, still pressing her hands against my wound. “Did a man ever have the patience to stop for half a second and listen?”
I started to try to speak, but she dug her hands into my wound and the pain bloomed electric. I grit my teeth against it.
“You be quiet too, Ori, this is much your doing. Can not we use our words? For once! Why all this violence? What have you taught the children? And you!” She turned her gaze on the one called Kel, “get your Captain some clothes! It’s indecent.”
The captain stood in the far corner completely wreathed in the same flame, and naked as the day he was born, but he seemed otherwise unharmed as he looked at his arms and chest and then sheepishly covered himself with his hands.
Just then the door to the bridge opened and an older bearded man with deep green eyes stepped in, paused, took in the room, glanced at the captain with a very strange look, shook himself as if trying to wake from a dream and stepped back, closing the door behind him.
“Joash,” the captain shouted angrily, “get a PT uniform from my locker.”
A muffled “Aye, sir.” Carried back through the door.
Kel looked at Sarai who was still glaring, and Telestrius lowered his weapon, shaking but trying to breathe steadily.
A small voice carried through the space, “Is baba ok?” Daria stepped around her mom and leaned over, dancing flames wreathing around her and whipping her hair into a mystic radiance.
“Daria don’t…” Her mother’s voice died as the little girl’s hand touched her mother’s hand which covered her father’s wound, and the flames glowed with soft amber light that warped and blinked.
I will not even try to explain the sensations that followed, from pain to numbness to a soft strengthening of my form. Even the blood was gone. I was whole again.
The door to the bridge opened again and the man called Joash tossed a simple shirt and shorts at the captain’s feet who reached first for the trousers which immediately were burned away, “In all the…”
He looked up, pleadingly. Joash nodded, and left, then the captain looked to me. “How do I make it stop?”
I continued staring at my little girl and could not think of any reply, so I shrugged as my own flame subsided. Sarai took off a portion of her shawl and covered me with it and then I folded Daria and Sarai into my arms.
The K-9 unit barked once. Devon barked back, and I laughed. We all did. What else could we do?
Friend, I cannot say this even seems a real story. So much of it is so plain, so simple. I had often thought the tales of my forebearers would be more wondrous, but here we have something almost foolish. Stray pulse bolts and strange powers. Yet my Lord is proved right by His ways. I can find no more mention in the histories or tales or vid logs of this particular time, so let us return to the words of Oruach.
The Waypoint at Eos is where my service began, where once I had enlisted in the legions. Despite its lack of atmosphere, heat on Eos is higher than many asteroids as its low albedo means it absorbs more of the sun’s rays than it reflects. Absorptive methods of energy generation were pioneered on Earth’s arctic and Antarctic regions, but finally realized on Eos – still it’s stark surface and domed structures of almost ancient crystal construction gave the sense not of a place of deep science and great breakthroughs of the Luminaries but of the darkness and severity of the barely restrained universe crouching to pounce back.
The last moments with my family on the cargo ship are still precious to me, too precious to share for fear that they are not quite what I remember. I have the mad despair that in attempting to re-tell them that I might change them and rob from them their pure savor for I recall them often – especially Daria and Devon.
I cared not to count the time from Mars to Eos, though someone could surely provide that. What I can say is it was not long enough with my beloved. We docked in the port nearest the military conclave after a long wait. The fleet of ships I saw on our approach seemed to double the size of the asteroid field as they gravity anchored to nearby objects to conserve fuel.
Little news had reached us, expectations of retaliations, whispers of terror and extremism. Despite clear initial concern from the men aboard the ship that I and my family may have been in some way responsible for the event at the Crimson Sanctum, the narratives shifted. The Captain, Lowan was his name – an interesting providence, ahi hakatan – he spilled some news to me I think in hopes of my explaining the flame. This I could not do, for at the time I knew far less than I do now, and even now I dare not claim to fully understand the Gift.
He told me that there were darksiders, anti-luminarian forces who had set the event in motion as a message against the Luminaries, a warning not to venture too far on the path to singularity and to return to the roots of humanity, to reconnect to our beast ancestors. How much was strict truth and how much rhetoric is ever a debate, and hardly worth discussing.
“How do you wield it? What can it do? Why did the specialist not survive it?” I recall his questions as he would pull me away from my family, and I sought merely to get him to leave me to them.
Ahi hakatan, I curse myself for this as well. Had I known, even thought to know, what his bearing of the flame meant at the time, I would have taken him to my arms and sought every moment of his growth in the Unseen Way.
I know that they wish me to reveal the secrets of our strength, the source of what they deem “sorcery,” but they would not understand anyway – though you yourself know. We could tell them point blank and still they would seek answers other than our claims. We could give them all the proofs of argument and every piece of evidence, sing them songs of the source of the gift and wonder and might and majesty, but they would not hear even the faintest note. They would mistake its melody for madness, its harmonies for horrors.
The captain seemed somewhat the same, though he held a true spark which I did not have the delight to see fanned into flame. I never saw him again after the time on the ship, after I was transferred to the custody of the Prison Legion on Eos.
Sarai embraced me, but her words are mine to own not yours or any of the luminarians. Ahi hakatan…
Convergence Conclave Clerical Note:
The translation of ANCIENT’s transmission here stops. A series of undecipherable wordings have baffled this translator and I confess that I am at a loss. Were we to grant this to MYSTIC he may decipher on our behalf, but we could not, perhaps, trust the translation. There is no conceivable reason why the othermind translators should be so incapable in this regard, though my own failings certainly can also not be forgiven. What I thought I knew of the tongue of the sorcerers is less than I realized.
I beg your pardon and request aid from more devout scholars than I. If ANCIENT and MYSTIC are to be of any help to us, we must find some way. I beg the intervention of your luminous grace for the sake of our glorious purpose to know to understand to grasp, and I ask your mercy.
Humbly,
RJ4 Marceus