Dusk (23 page)

A tap on his shoulder turned Cyrus’s
attention away from the hologram. “My turn,” Jang stood behind him.
His lab coat draped around his shoulders in a way that made it look
more like a cape. “Find out anything?”

“Not really. They keep talking about the mass
migration to Druvidia that’s coming up. Evidently, getting living
space there is a big deal, and I guess new construction has been
going on there to accommodate a large population.”

“Must be taxing having to move every
generation in order to run from the night. Wonder why they don’t
just make dome cycle lights that turn inward.”

“Well, these I’m sure run off the power of
Set itself; I can’t imagine the energy source required
otherwise.”

“I guess they do have a ginormous free fusion
reactor… say, you know, I forgot to tell you earlier, there was a
cast about the development of the faster-than-light drive last
night, or night cycle rather. They were talking about the first
ship to colonize here. The Anemoi I think it was called.”

“They say how it worked?”

“Something about reaching 50% of the speed of
light and then turning the gravity drive in on itself. Causes
space-time to ripple and uses Laurel contraction or something like
that…”

“Lorenz contraction.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Well they said the gravity
squeezes the ship to a size small enough to kind of fold into
space-time and unfold in another place. Time lapses, but it is
measured in seconds, not years. I’m sure it’s more complicated than
that, but the cast was written for Novitiates. It was pretty
puerile.”

“Probably has something to do with building
more efficient gravity drives. They have obviously made ones
smaller that are less demanding of energy.”

“Like that personnel lev we rode in on. That
thing wasn’t EM.”

“They say when they developed it?”

“I think they said it took around thirty
gyres on Earth to develop it and implement it into the first ship.
Thirty gyres—a little more than eight years I guess.”

“Pretty big project,” Cyrus stood, stretching
out his legs momentarily before standing fully erect. He arched his
back and his shoulders blades until there was a slight pop from his
spine. Jang pulled his lab coat over his shoulders and sat Indian
style, usual position in front of the holovision. “You get much
rest?” Cyrus asked as he turned to walk away.

“Nope, been hard to sleep since I got
waylaid. I catch ten to twenty here and there in fugues. I’m
starting to see people standing behind me. I’d be a complete lab
rodent right now if it wasn’t for my shifts on this thing.” Jang
indicated the hologram as an advertisement for upscale living space
in Druvidia displayed a somewhat Spartan, but spacious dwelling.
Cyrus nodded and returned to his own bunk.

Villichez stood looking out the window as
Cyrus sat down next to him. The dome was dimming almost
imperceptibly, giving the impression of a sunset in a moonless sky.
The artificial twilight was convincing except for the corner of
orange sun peeking from behind a building at the end of the ave,
fading with the darkening dome rather than descending below the
horizon as it should.

“The speech patterns in this place are
becoming marginally understandable, no?” Villichez scanned the ave
outside, looking at the other building, in hopes someone might be
there looking back.

“Seems to me, the more proper speech, like
from the newscasts and children’s casts, are more like standard
Commonspeak than the colloquial speech in this facility. I find the
educational and informational streams considerably easier to
understand.” Cyrus said, rubbing his thighs deliberately and
stretching out his fingers to their limits as he kneaded his legs
with his palms.

“Discover anything on your shift?” Villichez
didn’t take his eyes away from the city milling beneath them.

“Not really. Even though it was the newscast,
seems like not much happens here. This Defiance thing seems to be
the most interesting thing around.” Cyrus rubbed the fingers in his
right hand until two of his knuckles popped. “Someone did steal
some sort of military vehicle. They blamed it, like everything else
wrong the last few Dome Cycles, on those Apostate clowns. Other
than that it was normal, just your usual robbery or violent act.”
Cyrus twined the fingers of his hands together and then untwined
them.

“Disturbing that we find robbery and acts of
violence normal, don’t you think?” Villichez stayed focused on the
dimming sun, no longer too bright to look at directly.

“Well, jealousy and anger, however base, are
natural human emotions. Our responses to them would also have a
range of normalcy and a threshold. A threshold that, I would think,
exists on both sides of the bell curve. For every depraved action,
there should be an overly tolerant, or equally base, inertia. They
have to both exist for motion in any direction, but we tend to
select them arbitrarily, and to our own tastes.” Cyrus was more
alert now, his fingers no longer needing to move to engage his
mind.

“I’m not sure I follow your meaning,”
Villichez turned from the window to face Cyrus.

“You see, it is not unheard of for a renegade
monkey who is denied alpha status by a stronger monkey to steal the
female offspring of the alpha monkey and raise it himself. Not as
its own offspring, but as a mate, so that his own offspring might
be stronger. If a human had even the desire to do this, you would
log a great deal of hours in your appointment book. If he actually
went through with it, we would throw him into the deepest darkest
nook of the most horrid prison we could find. And yet, zoologists
turn a jaundiced eye to it, reading it off as natural, so long as
it’s a monkey that’s doing it. No one throws the monkey in jail. We
just log it, categorize it, and keep moving. I know this example is
extreme, but there are a great many responses to emotion that are
not as extreme, but fit the same paradigm that humans and monkeys
share. But people like Winberg and the Meritocracy believe they
somehow are unsavory for men, or rather affluent men, to indulge
in.”

“But, human beings, my friend, are not
monkeys.”

“Given our current circumstance, I strongly
beg to differ,” Cyrus smiled. Villichez opened his mouth to answer
but whatever he was about to say was shattered into oblivion by
Jang’s excitement.

“Look! There’s a cast stream on that Knight
of Swords guy,” Jang reported, raising the contrast on the hologram
so everyone could see. Everyone who had the slightest of their wits
about them focused on the images that spread across the floor.

“...first Grand Mobius of Archons fronted the
plight in the defense of Asha. Aerik Kazamesh, who became known as
The Man of Swords, levied on the first vessel from Earth
forty-seven gyres before the first. He helped design the Eurydice
Dome and was given the title of Prefect of Stone while the first
Prolocutor, Rex Mundi, was overseeing the construction of
Druvidia.” An image of a city-sized dome under construction spread
across the floor in front of them. Construction levs lumbered
around the structure carrying building materials and manipulating
parts of the dome with mechanical arms. The image faded, revealing
a recording of a considerably older hologram. A man wearing a white
linen robe was speaking in remarkably clear Commonspeak, with no
trace of the accent the scientists had been assaulted with since
their ill-fated arrival.

“When Prolocutor Mundi refused to allow any
more levies from Earth and began violently turning away more
persistent ships, Kazamesh was appointed Grand Mobius. He then
established the Archons of Asha to help defend against the Terran
backlash.”

“A quiet and private man, Kazamesh refused
public interviews and only regaled queries through surrogation.
Although his surrogations were always quip and keen, he proved as
shrewd and ruthless at military strategy. His strategies turned
back attack after attack from Earth.” An image of a man wearing a
more Earth-like version of the uniform Denali had been wearing
faded from view, and the image was replaced by holograms of several
smaller fighters attacking an ominous warship in a four-point
pincer formation. Suddenly, what looked like a small asteroid sped
in from some place off the hologram and collided with the warship
in a place where the fighters had been concentrating their fire. It
tore a hole in the side of the warship and metal, flame, and what
could have only been bodies vomited from the scar. As the flames
dissipated into the vacuum, the image faded again to reveal another
image of Kazamesh in uniform, now holding some sort of card.

“When asked how he managed to continue to win
battles with minimal losses, he jatterly remarked that he used a
set of Tarot cards given to him by his mother. This spawned the
moniker ‘Knight of Swords,’ which he himself embraced.” The
hologram grew, filling the floor with the image of a Tarot card.
The card showed a knight, sword in hand, charging on his horse
toward some unseen foe. The card rotated once slowly and then
dissolved into more scenes of interstellar battle. Extraplantetary
lasers extended from Ashan frigates, ripping into large Earth
warships. The warships fired volleys of missiles so numerous they
looked like clouds of smoke. Electromagnetic disrupter fields
around the warships gave off flashes of purple and red as they
diffused many of the lasers, while frigates and fighters evaded or
launched countermeasures. It looked like the later levels of
Conquest of Ages, but was both quieter and yet more sinister.

“Earth began to send more vessels, and it
seemed the war would press on for hundreds of gyres, but the
invention of the Whisper Node gave Asha the edge over our
oppressors. The ability to communicate instantly over any distance
gave the Archons the ability to attack Earth directly.” What must
have been scientists and engineers, not in lab coats, but in light
blue jumpsuits, posed next to an odd cube of machine that looked
like a food processor. The scene switched to an image of a land
dock where frigates and other engines of destruction were being
assembled.

“Resources were plentiful, but with the
construction of Jacob’s Ladder and the Druvidian Project, ship
construction was limited. Prolocutor Mundi suggested the forces
regroup and fortify, but the Man of Swords had devised one final
attack.” A computer-generated image of a carrier ship, seemingly
weaponless, appeared on the screen. It rotated slowly as it hovered
above the floor. The side of the ship melted away to reveal its
insides, giving an impression of scale. It was a smaller, extremely
Earth-like ship that looked much like the Paracelsus.

“In defiance of the orders of the Prolocutor
and the Praetoriate, the Knight of Swords launched Mjolnir, a
faster-than-light craft retrofitted with a near-light drive. In a
most heartless attack, he ordered Mjolnir to unfold just outside
Earth orbit, traveling at 98% of the speed of light.” An image of
the northern hemisphere of Earth appeared, and just above the North
Pole, there was a glimmer that erupted into what looked like a
laser beam. The beam flashed for a fraction of a second and then
erupted in an explosion in the Arctic Circle. Even though the
hologram played out in slow motion, the explosion spread faster
than the eye could see, filling the floor with a flash of white
light. Cyrus wanted to shield his eyes as Jang and Villichez did,
but he looked on, enduring the pain of his pupils shrinking to
pinpoints.

“The impact with the polar ice cap must have
caused great devastation. The decisive blow finished the war, but
little is currently known of the Terrans’ fate as no word has been
heard from Earth in the 2200 gyres since the Defiance.” The
hologram, which had remained inactive since the explosion, now
faded what looked like a tribunal into view. There were three
figures sitting behind a large table on a rostrum. They each wore
blue hoods that completely obscured their faces. A small diadem
rested on each hood. The symbol of an eye surrounded by six wings
in an aster graced each diadem. A man stood before the tribunal,
hands clasped behind his back. He had the same stature as the image
of the man they had associated with the Knight of Swords, but this
man’s hair was less perfect, his clothing more ruffled, and his
unkempt beard obscured his features. The hologram focused more on
the tribunal than on the man.

“For his crimes, the Knight of Swords was
sentenced to death, but was pardoned and exiled by Prolocutor
Mundi. At his adjudication, the Sword Scourge, when asked if he had
any remorse, regaled that there was only one man in the universe he
had to answer to, and he refused to say anything else. Upon his
exile, the Sword Knight’s charisma left a lasting legacy. Even
rightforth, the message of the Knight speaks to youth, and has
resulted in the formation of the Apostates of the Sword, a radical
group that spreads mayhem and confusion throughout the city. There
are even rumors that the bunker where the Knight was exiled has
been inhabited for several gyres by the Apostates. However, that
rumor is unconfirmed as the location of that bunker is unknown. The
Advent marks the DC where light from the explosion of Mjolnir can
be seen in the darkened dome. There will be a full DC darkening and
all ave traffic will be stopped for one full hor in observance of
the Advent of The Defiance.”

“What the hell is a
hor
?” Winberg
bellowed.

“It’s an hour, just with the accent,” Jang
replied as someone from the back of the group shushed them
both.

Cyrus could barely hear them. He stared
through the three dimensional scenes that played out on the floor.
The shapes and colors blurred, the sounds became muffled, and
everything obscured until neither images nor sounds held meaning
for him. His vision faded until only the numbers in his head were
real.