Light Shaper (54 page)

“My name is Marie, Stewardess of the
Stormchild
,” she said.

Rigel remembered he had a tongue. “Hi, I’m Rigel. This is Steve.”

She looked at both of them with a shrewd eye. Her gaze lingered for a bit too long on Steve, and Rigel felt a little stab of jealousy.

“Which of you was responsible for freeing Kyrios in this Haven?” she asked quickly.

“Kyrios? You mean Atlas?” Rigel asked. He raised his hand. “That would be me.”

Kenichi edged a bit closer, staring at Rigel’s metallic gloves. “Whoa, dude, are those for real? What are they, like weapons or something?”

Rigel laughed. “Not really, but I can do stuff with them. Control machines, I think. Atlas gave them to me.”

“Hmmm,” Marie cut in. “We may have to confiscate those. Analyze them in case they are a threat.”

“I don’t think so,” Steve answered her, stepping forward. His deep voice must have surprised Marie a little bit, because she drew back ever so slightly.

“So you can speak,” she said, flashing a disarmingly seductive smile that still managed to be cold. “You must be the bodyguard, then.”

Kenichi shuffled closer to Marie and elbowed her in the ribs.

“What?” Marie snapped impatiently.

Kenichi pointed at them. “Um, Marie, I don’t think he is the bodyguard. They’re kind of holding hands, in case you didn’t notice?”

Marie blinked. Rigel could have sworn she really hadn’t noticed. “Oh. Well, then maybe I can—”

“Hey, Marie,” somebody else said. A young man with dark hair, tall and lean. “You’re not interrogating them or anything, are you?”

Rigel looked, and he saw the man approaching holding a younger kid’s hand. The kid looked frail, walking as if afraid to fall, his long limbs gangly and thin.

“We don’t know who these people are, Alain,” Marie protested, but she stepped aside. “All we have is Dex’s vision or whatever you want to call it, come out of the blue. They could be anyone.”

The young man, Alain, actually rolled his eyes. He had nice wavy hair. “That’s right, Marie. They could even be friends.”

He walked right up to Steve and offered his hand to shake. Steve hesitated an instant, but he took it, masking all traces of pain the motion must have caused.

“I am Alain, Captain of this ship,” he said. “Excuse Marie. She’s always like that.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Marie asked, crossing her arms. Rigel couldn’t help thinking that she looked like an annoyed movie star.

Alain ignored her and turned to Rigel.

“Hey.”

“Hi, I’m Rigel, nice to meet you.”

“Same here,” Alain said. “It’s great knowing there’s somebody else out there trying to stop the Primes. I don’t even know how you did it! You two alone, against a corrupted fragment of Kyrios. It must have been hell.”

Rigel was going to answer, but he caught the kid’s eye, the one holding Alain’s hand.

He felt… power. Coming from that boy.

“He did it with his hands,” the boy said, pointing at Rigel. His voice was soft, but it carried.

“How did you…,” Rigel began. Then he remembered the brief but powerful mental contact he had experienced just minutes before. “Are you the Seer?”

The boy smiled shyly. “Yes. My name is Dex.”

“It’s Dexter, actually,” Alain explained. “He’s my little brother.”

Rigel extended his hand. Dex let go of his brother’s hand to shake his.

When they touched, Rigel’s gloves glowed a blinding orange.

“Whoa!” Kenichi exclaimed.

“Biopolymer,” Dex said to Rigel. “It is a precious gift. You must have been very brave to give up your chance of healing in order to save Kyrios. Thank you, Rigel. Because of you we have hope.”

Rigel didn’t know what to say to someone who knew so much about him already, but he was spared from answering because at that moment three other people came down the ramp to join them.

“No way!” the first of them said, a friendly-looking guy wearing stained work coveralls with way too many pockets. He rushed straight at Rigel. “Is that actual biopolymer?”

“Um…,” Rigel mumbled.

The guy took both of Rigel’s hands in his with an expression of awe. “This is incredible! It even seems to have fused with your skin…. How did this happen? Do you mind if I run a few tests? I should be able to find the degree of neural integration and maybe sample the nerve-transmission threshold. I’ve never seen it integrated with a living person like this!”

Rigel looked around blankly.

“Omar, back off before you make them think we’re crazy,” Alain said, clapping the other guy on the shoulder. To Rigel and Steve he said, “Sorry. He’s our engineer. He sometimes gets a bit carried away.”

Steve let go of Rigel’s hand suddenly. Rigel saw him tense up and turn his body slightly away so his wounded arm would not be as exposed.

He was having a staring contest with a mean-looking man standing near the back. The man was the only one of the seven that carried a weapon, and he wore an Enforcer’s uniform. His head was shaved bald, his body hard and well muscled. Rigel had heard of Enforcers, the elite security forces for some of the Havens of old, trained in every form of combat. They had all died out many decades ago. Except for this guy, apparently.

Kenichi was the first to catch on to the tension.

“Um, Alain?” he said, poking the captain in the shoulder. “I think those two big guys are trying to decide who has bigger arms. My money’s on the new guy, by the way. Sorry, Nikos.”

“Hey,” the Enforcer, Nikos, said to Steve. It didn’t sound friendly.

“Hey,” Steve answered. Neither of them relaxed or moved an inch.

There was an annoyed sigh from the very back, and a slender woman pushed past Nikos, tossing her long curly hair in his face. “For goodness’ sake, could we keep the macho posturing contest for some other time? We don’t know how long these two men have been here and—your arm!” she exclaimed, rushing over to Steve. He looked at her in surprise but did not pull away when she reached for his broken arm. Steve let her handle it. She touched it lightly with careful, expert fingers.

“Rain,” Marie called out warningly to the woman. Rain ignored her and everyone else, except for her patient.

“Does it hurt when I press here?” she asked Steve, placing two of her fingers at a spot above the break.

Steve didn’t flinch, but he nodded. “Yes.”

“And here?”

“A little less.”

“What happened? It looks like a clean break, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Your nose is probably broken too, but I can’t tell for sure with this light. And the bruising on your skin…. Are those
knife
cuts?”

“Most of it was that battle armor over there,” Rigel intervened, pointing backward. He saw Kenichi and Omar immediately head off in that direction to check it out. “It attacked us. Steve saved my life.”

“And then you saved mine,” Steve said, smiling briefly at Rigel.

Rain must have caught the meaning of their exchange because she smiled briefly. “Fine. But this arm needs to be set immediately, and that nose needs to be straightened now. Is your side hurt too? You seem to favor it. A rib? Come on, the quicker we do it, the faster you heal. I’m guessing from those muscles of yours that you love to work out. Once you get all better you can work out with Nikos. That way he’ll stop bugging me about spending hours and hours in that awful gym.”

“You have a gym in there?” Steve asked, surprised.

“A good one,” Nikos answered.

“Dynamic-density weight sets?” Steve said.

Nikos nodded. “And a reconfigurable pulley system you can’t even imagine.”

Steve grinned. Rain led him away by his good arm, muttering something like “Men!” with annoyance. Steve followed her willingly, already deep in talk with Nikos about something called circuit-workout sets.

Alain came closer and set his hand on Rigel’s shoulder. “Welcome to the
Stormchild
, Rigel. It’s only the seven of us as crew, but the group is a good bunch. Even Marie is nice, once you get to know her.”

Rigel smiled at Alain and Dex. From Marie he got a curt nod, but Rigel noticed her scowl was not as pronounced anymore. Alain led him up the ramp carefully, to the ship, while Marie hung back to shout at Omar and Kenichi that they needed to stop ogling that battle armor and get started on packing up the servers in what Rigel knew as the cradle room.

Rigel wavered slightly as he was about to enter the ship itself. He was exhausted. He grabbed on to the ship’s hull to steady himself, and he immediately felt something like a thrum of shared awareness pass from the ship into his hands. He thought of Atlas; it was involuntary.

And something inside the ship answered back.

“The power of Kyrios grows as its fragments join,” Dex said quietly as he and Rigel crossed the threshold into the
Stormchild
. “We might yet fight against the Core, and win.”

Rigel was going to ask what he meant by that, but at that moment he stepped onto the hallway, and a blur of black fur came bounding out of nowhere to launch itself straight at him.

“Ahhhhh!” Rigel yelled even as he was thrown back by the gigantic beast. It looked like a wolf cub on steroids, and its muzzle was right over his face.

“Rent!” Alain yelled at it.

Then its warm tongue came out, and the beast was licking Rigel furiously. It tickled.

“I forgot to mention,” Alain told Rigel as he was struggling to stand up in between licks. “We also have a dog.”

Haven Prime: Book One

The world is gone. All that’s left are the monsters.

The creatures attacked Haven VII with no warning. An AI named Kyrios, a nearly omnipotent being, should have protected the city during the Night of the Swarm.

Except It didn’t.

No one knows why It failed, or why It saved eight specific people: the Captain, the Seer, the Sentry, the Messenger, the Engineer, the Alchemist, the Medic, and the Stewardess. They have no idea of the meaning behind the titles they’ve been given, why they were selected and brought together, or what Kyrios expects from them. When they awake from stasis, they find their city in ruins and everyone long dead. They’re alone—or so they think. But then the creatures start pouring out from underground, looking for them. They don’t stand a chance in a fight, and with limited supplies, they can’t run forever. All they know is that the creatures aren’t their only enemies, and there’s only one place they can turn. Kyrios beckons them toward Its Portal, but can It be trusted? In Its isolated shrine in the desert, they might find the answers they need—if they can survive long enough to reach it.

“
Earthshatter
literally shattered my mind, it is an amazing read and for its main genre Sci-Fi it is like absolutely nothing I have read for years.”

—On Top Down Under Reviews

“…if you’re looking for a wonderful story to immerse yourself in that leaves you on the edge of your seat gasping for breath at times, then this is for you.”

—MM Good Book Reviews

“If you are a science fiction lover looking for a novel into which you can sink your teeth (and mind), look no further.”

—Prism Book Alliance

“Whoo boy! This book was pretty much one non-stop ride from the first page to the last.”

—Love Bytes

ALBERT NOTHLIT
wanted to become a writer long before he realized it was his way of connecting with others. There is something special in reaching out through words that carry a piece of his soul, and there is nothing better for him than hearing back from readers. It turns the product of what can be a very individual-centered profession into a shared experience, a chance to talk, to grow, and share. He firmly believes that the desire to create new worlds out of thoughts, memories, and emotions speaks to a greater truth within him. He still hasn’t figured out what that is, though. It’s going to take a lot more meditation, for which he unfortunately has no patience. He only knows that books changed his life, and that brightening someone else’s day with a story is the highest accomplishment he can think of achieving.

Albert currently lives in Mexico City, where he has somewhat reluctantly gotten used to the crowds. He shares a home with his husband and their sassy little dog named Link. His two other passions are gaming and running, although not games involving running because those can be boring. His favorite games are RPGs, and one of his guilty pleasures is watching eSports in pubs whenever the opportunity arises. He has an MSc in Environmental Engineering, which has turned out to be surprisingly helpful in creating postapocalyptic science-fiction worlds. Not that he thinks an apocalypse is unavoidable. He is a secretly hopeful man who thinks the future will be better—just no flying cars. Imagine the safety hazards.

E-mail: [email protected]

Website: www.albertnothlit.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/albertnothlit

By
ALBERT NOTHLIT