《Encapsulation - FIRST DRAFT》 C1 - Sabotage & C2 - Constabular Brutality In a distant galaxy, human exiles colonizing a tiny planet called Dirt lived for more than a dozen generations before they next encountered an interstellar traveler. By this time, much of their ancient knowledge was forgotten. They no longer recognized their ancestry among the stars. They had only a generation previously looked again to the skies, and their initial attempts at leaving their planet had resulted in catastrophic failure. Of course, the other splinters of humanity did not regress in the same way. *** A transmission notification blinked on Lieutenant Angers¡¯ short-range communications channel. ¡°Open communications,¡± he said. ¡°Lieutenant,¡± a voice crackled over the speakers, ¡°why aren''t you dropping out of orbit?¡± Angers began his seventh orbit of the space station, the docking bay light beneath him receding into the distance as he passed further from it. Well, he couldn''t exactly declare that he carried illicit cargo. Granted, he wouldn''t have approached the station in the first place had he known he was carrying that cargo fifteen minutes previously. There was nothing to do about that now. There could be no rationalization of it. The disciplinary methods of the Paraceum, humanity''s governing AI, were brutal and horrific. They did not preserve the dignity or individuality of even government agents like Angers. The virus which Angers unwittingly carried aboard his starfighter would be eradicated along with the starfighter and its pilot if it were detected. It was a good thing the station had no reason to scan the Blue Shrike for Angers'' vitals, couldn''t read the cortisol and adrenaline that described how utterly on the verge of panic Angers was. Ideologue viruses had the chilling power to infect computers and human brains alike. Expensive surgery could remove it from Angers¡¯ brain if he were already infected, but would be much cheaper to simply erase him and promote another officer into his place. Angers turned and looked back at the holographic display behind the seats of his cockpit. A three-dimensional shape pulsed there, looking like a mechanical squid covered in eyes. Text had initially scrolled across this model¡¯s surface, laughing at Angers, telling him that he was dead whichever way he turned. It made his blood boil, and he swore at the virus and its creator. Angers knew who had planted the virus on his ship. Only one person had the subtlety to plant a time-released ideologue virus that was completely invisible to the onboard antivirus routines. Angers happened to have put that pirate into prison more times than any other officer of the Paraceum. Angers gritted his teeth as the same officer from the space station repeated himself, asking why Angers was not docking. He couldn''t simply lie and say he had a hardware or software malfunction that prevented him from beginning the dock procedure. If he did so, diagnostics from the station would immediately begin on his ship, and would quickly realize that the components of the ship were perfectly functioning. They¡¯d also immediately notice the virus. There were hundreds of thousands of lieutenants in the system. It was no hard rank to reach. The loss of one would not be great, even one as accomplished for his time in service as Angers. No, if Angers wanted any chance of getting out of this alive, he had to betray his command structure and give everything up just for a chance at life. The thought made him feel sick, but he couldn''t listen to his feelings now. So with only the briefest moment of hesitation, Angers activated his escape thrusters, bursting out of the space station¡¯s orbit. A few moments later, a tractor beam snapped onto his escape vector, but it came too late. The tractor beam was designed to pull in damaged ships who had already entered the station¡¯s orbit, not to grab ships trying to escape. The situation rarely came that a ship would try to escape a Paraceum space station against that station¡¯s will. Angers¡¯ ship, the Blue Shrike, burst through local space at a rate that burned an alarming portion of the ship¡¯s localspace fuel. He really needed to refuel soon. But his hyperdrive did not run on local fuel. It ran on nuclear cells, and he still had one of those left. Paraceum starfighters of a class smaller than Angers¡¯ own, but more maneuverable, zipped onto the Blue Shrike¡¯s trail. There were three of them, each armed with a filament hook as well as ion cannons. They intended to hook Angers and drag him physically back to the station. Angers could not allow this. Nor could he afford to jump onto a hyperspace rail, for the pursuers would simply hop onto the same one. No, Angers punched in a random set of coordinates, praying that he would not be disintegrated by a heavy planet as he passed onto what were effectively the back roads of hyperspace. The Blue Shrike evaporated into hyperspace, and the Paraceum interceptors found themselves alone in the void beyond the space station, no doubt cursing Angers for a fool with a death wish. Hyperspace travel outside of an established rail was a nightmare in an almost literal sense. The four-dimensional aspect of hyperspace was impossible for a human mind to comprehend. Though the Blue Shrike¡¯s viewport was equipped with a projector that did its best to translate four-dimensional shapes into a close equivalent of the three-dimensional shadows encountered by humans in localspace, this was only really possible on the hyperspace rails, which had been thoroughly mapped across the whole system centuries ago, and their three-dimensional representations calculated out by hand. Ships were not intended to travel off of the rails. Stars and asteroids and celestial clouds passed, and the viewport¡¯s projector attempted to render them, but their shapes were alien and unreal. Planets seemed to have eyes. Stars appeared like bellowing dragons exhaling life-giving radiation in every direction. Clouds of gas appeared as swarms of chittering creatures. Though they passed so ridiculously quickly at this faster-than-light speed, all these strange effects of time in hyperspace allowed Angers to contemplate each as they passed. He couldn''t pull his eyes away. It did little for his frantic state of mind. Angers could do little more than grip his controls with stiff hands, every muscle in his body tense, as he prayed beyond all hope that he would not pass directly into the path of a celestial body of significant enough gravitational mass that his ship would disintegrate as it passed through. The computer did its best to navigate toward smaller bodies, ones which were so out of phase with the ship that he could pass through them without any issue, but every time this occurred, the Blue Shrike''s speed dropped slightly. If this continued long enough, the ship would run out of hyperspace fuel and to be incapable of dropping out back into localspace. If this happened, Angers would be frozen forever in hyperspace, incapable of dying, incapable of doing anything except moving within the confines of the ideological constructs that were his ship and his body. Somehow, Angers escaped this fate. When his fuel ran low, Angers began a scan for nearby, moderately technological planets that were not directly controlled by the Paraceum. Hundreds of these colony worlds existed in the galaxy, planets once settled by splinter groups of humans who wanted to escape the Paraceum¡¯s grasp and its technological supremacy. These colonies were permitted to take only the bare minimum of technology with them, so that they could not rise as parasites against their technological god. Angers had once been a member of a task force which had investigated several of these colony worlds to ensure that, several generations after their colonization, they had not been hiding any kind of underground technological power. In every case, the people of these colonies have been ordinary, and though they still had people among them from the first generation of colonists who remembered the Paraceum, the children and grandchildren of those colonists had not grown up with first-hand experience of them, and looked to the starfarers with wonder.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. These worlds were intensely difficult to locate with the equipment on board the Blue Shrike. Though the terraforming units of each of these colonies transmitted out a regular signal which allowed them to be individually and specifically tracked across the system, the Blue Shrike did not draw from the central database. Even if it did, Angers knew that relying on the database would be stupid. Agents would search the Paraceum¡¯s central computer already for whatever telemetry the Blue Shrike sent out into the ether. Angers had disabled as many have these telemetric options as possible when he first began the hyperspace voyage, as was ordinarily practice for coming into range of an enemy alien world, but he was certain there were still some signals which he was incapable of turning off, which likely only the Paraceum itself could sense. There! There was a signal. An ancient exile world''s signal, intensely weak, one with strength equivalent to a fourteenth-generation colony. This worried Angers. Would their technology have regressed to where they would be incapable of providing him with the fuel he needed to get his starship up and running in localspace again? But perhaps that wasn''t even worth considering. Where exactly was Angers supposed to go? He had an ideologue virus on his ship. He could only escape the Paraceum completely by leaving behind any trace of his old self. Perhaps this planet was where he would spend the rest of his life. Angers keyed in the coordinates of that colony planet and materialized back into localspace. More proper representation of three-dimensional space asserted itself, warping the nightmarish features of the universe into blessed and beautiful spheres and clouds around him. The low fuel indicator immediately flashed to life, and Angers realized with a sinking feeling that he did not even have enough fuel to properly land on the rapidly approaching planet before him. Angers fell into orbit, gripping the Blue Shrike''s controls with white knuckles. He had only enough fuel left for one maneuver. Though his heart pounded, screaming at him to move, to act, he forced his mind into stillness. He would ensure every detail was in place before beginning his descent. *** The constable punched Carrick hard in the gut. Water dripped from moldy pipes at the roof of the small, dim room, forming a puddle at the feet of Carrick and his two constable guards. One of these constables held Carrick¡¯s shoulders tightly to the back of the chair to which he was tied. This constable rarely spoke, except occasionally to say in a jovial voice things like ¡°Oh, come on, do we really need to be that hard on him? I''m sure he''s ready to tell us now. You just give him a chance, I''m sure he''ll tell us.¡± And then Carrick would continue his silence, refusing to speak, and the first constable, the meatier one, the one with the flat nose and the cauliflower ear and the knobbly knuckles, would begin slugging Carrick again until the one in the back again raised the idea that Carrick might cooperate after all. ¡°You''re not doing yourself any favors,¡± the cheerful constable said. ¡°They¡¯d turn you in for nothing at all, Carrick, you know that. You''re loyal, but your loyalty¡¯s wasted on them. You''d make a fine constable if you gave your loyalty to people who actually deserved it.¡± Carrick gritted his teeth. He couldn''t stop himself from responding, his voice full of desperation and pain. ¡°Never do that!¡± he growled. His face and tongue were swollen. The words were barely intelligible. ¡°The Family does what needs doing. What¡¯ve you ever done for anyone who doesn''t wear a suit and drive a fancy car?¡± The ugly constable punched him hard on the cheekbone. Stars burst in Carrick''s vision. The ugly constable leaned down. He barely ever talked, letting the cheerful constable do most of it, but he spoke now. His voice was eerily calm and articulate. ¡°You''re going to be on hard labor for the rest of your short and miserable life if you don''t give them up,¡± he said. ¡°Now don''t get the wrong idea, Carrick, I don''t hate you. You''re a pretty decent young man, all things considered. I know just as well as you the kind of scum who run this town. I''m very well aware that the gang you hang around with are not the worst people alive. ¡°But I''ve got a job to do, Carrick. A man has to do his job, no matter how unpleasant. It''s how you survive, how you bring home dinner for your family. Cause when you don''t, your kids don¡¯t respect authority and become pieces of crap. They don''t turn out as nice as you in particular. None of the charm, none of the good-heartedness, but all of the trouble-making. They become pieces of crap only worthy of being scraped off the bottom of a boot and then burned. I¡¯m doing this to you, Carrick, because I''m not going to let my kids become little stains on society like the worst of those rapists and murderers you hang out with. ¡°We didn''t catch them, Carrick. We caught you. Do me a favor and give me the information so I can stop punching someone who doesn''t really deserve it and get my hands on the people who do. Just tell me about the worst ones. Leave out whoever you feel like. You don''t have to hand over the other decent kids. I know there''re others. I know it''s not just you. Hand over all the bad eggs and operate with just the decent people. I''ve got a feeling you could turn things around and do some good in this town if you did that.¡± Carrick spat blood onto the ground. He could have spat it into the constable¡¯s face. He chose not to. He forced words through a foggy mind and a swollen mouth. ¡°I don''t think you get it,¡± he said. ¡°They''re the Family. They¡¯re¡­ my family. You can''t choose¡­ your family. Even if you have kids who did stupid stuff and, and¡­ became no-good criminals like me, you''d still love them, wouldn''t you? Might¡­ call them pieces of crap now, but you¡¯d still¡­ love them¡­ cause they were your kids. Well¡­ these are the people who took me in¡­ took me in when I had no one to speak for me. I''m not going to give them up and¡­ and betray everything just because I¡­ don''t like¡­ some of their activities.¡± The cheerful constable spoke again, but the ugly one gave him a gesture to shut up. ¡°Throwing you in a cell for the night, Carrick. Tomorrow you''re gonna have your trial. At that trial, you¡¯re gonna to be found guilty, and you¡¯re gonna be sentenced to hard labor that¡¯ll go on every day until you¡¯re dead. You pissed off the wrong man in a suit, Carrick. I''m sorry we couldn''t work anything more out.¡± ¡°So am I, I guess,¡± said Carrick heavily. They threw him in a cell with bread and water of a better quality than the law required them to give him. Nonetheless, Carrick was in far too much pain, and his face was far too swollen, to eat. He drank all the water, though, and yelled that he wanted some more. None came. He was alone in the cell. There was not even a guard to keep watch on him. The cell was in a small shack at the back of the police station, separated from the rest of the station and kept well out of the eyes of the public. It was an interrogation room and nothing more. There was no hope of escape, for the cell was locked with a heavy padlock which Carrick couldn''t have picked even if his hands weren¡¯t swollen from the beating. Not that he even had tools on him. Carrick lay on his back in the dirt and filth of the cell, surrounded by the stench of excrement of other prisoners left here before him. He looked up to the darkness of the ceiling, his heart sinking. He knew he couldn''t expect to be broken out. If only he had hope for a prison sentence that might run out in a few years, things wouldn''t be so bad. It might have been a badge of honor, in fact, once he got out and returned to the Family. They would have given him tremendous respect. He would have proved his loyalty to those who doubted. Despite all the work he was unwilling to do for the family. Despite his very vocal misgivings about some of the more nefarious activities of the organization. It didn''t matter. He would be loyal. Carrick wasn''t silent only because he thought he could get something out of it. He would be an example to all the others that you could be a decent guy and not just be a snitch waiting to happen. That''s what everyone had always thought of him, that he wasn''t willing to put his skin in the game, that he only stayed out of things so that when he inevitably got caught, as happens from time to time among the Family, that he could claim that he wasn''t really part of them, not like those murderers and thieves and kidnappers. People always said that Carrick would turn on them at a moment''s notice. The Boss never listened to them. He always said that if Carrick came up dead, he''d assume it was one of them, and stop at nothing until he figured out which one of the Family had betrayed their own. He said it was in the best interest of the other members to keep Carrick alive. Well, they hadn¡¯t been able to keep him from the hands of the constables when the job went bad. No doubt they''d be trying to convince the Boss to move their base out of town, assuming that Carrick was even now giving them all up for his freedom. When Carrick went out to the Wasteland and died in just a couple of days, he would show them at last that it was possible to be a decent person and remain loyal to the Family. There were others among their ranks who hated the lengths and extents of the crimes the Family got themselves into. Others who preferred to go on a thieving mission than something more intrinsically violent, who treated hostages very well, who actively and physically punished junior members of the Family who thought that being a part of such a tremendous criminal organization gave them the freedom to rape or assault any random person they desired. A couple of these people were higher-ups in the Family, and Carrick knew that there was a shred of truth in what the constables had told him. If he gave up the Boss, it was very possible that others might come into power who would add a shred more of humanity to the Family''s activities. The Boss was ruthless. He was fond of Carrick; he encouraged him; he was proud that Carrick kept to his principles. The Boss had his own principles. They did not exactly align with Carrick¡¯s own. They were brutal, dangerous principles. But the Boss had truly taken care of Carrick when no one else had. The Boss had saved Carrick, once upon a time, and so Carrick went to his death rather than betray the man who had saved him. C3 - Convicted Prisoner They dragged Carrick into court the very next morning. The courthouse was small, dark, and imperious. It did not need to be large, for the town was small. It sat in the downtown district, and other, more ordinary businesses rose up around it. It looked out of place. Inside, the courthouse seemed almost as a dingy as the holding cell had been. Oily dust covered the floor, and the folding chairs upon which the officers of the court set had seen better days. Four cases were tried before Carrick¡¯s came up, and each was dismissed quickly and roughly. Finally, two constables took Carrick¡¯s elbows and dragged him before the judge. They were not the constables who had interrogated him. These were stony-faced and impartial. Carrick likewise kept a still expression. He prided himself on this. It was a matter of professionalism for a member of the Family who came before the court. Despite the throbbing pain in his face and all throughout his body, he maintained dignity. The judge looked down at Carrick over a pair of wormy lips and a very short nose. He recognized Carrick, as any judge would. Carrick did not recognize him, though. He had come before the courts three times previously in his life for much less severe charges. Those judges had all been quietly paid off, and Carrick had never spent more than a month at a time in community service. That would not be the case now. The court crier announced the case. ¡°Carrick of no family name comes before the court accused of accessory to the murder of a prominent business owner, his wife, and the constable who investigated the crime. Carrick of no family name is the known associate and prot¨¦g¨¦ of the head of the Kingfisher crime family.¡± Carrick returned the judge¡¯s gaze coolly. His heart shuddered in his chest. The judge opened his mouth to speak, his dry lips peeling apart disgustingly. ¡°He does not stand accused of the crime of murder itself?¡± The constable at Carrick¡¯s left spoke. ¡°No, your honor. We have no reason to believe the defendant committed the crime itself.¡± The judge now spoke to Carrick himself. ¡°It is the duty of every citizen to assist law enforcement in the prevention and punishment of all crime,¡± he said. ¡°If it was within your power to stop this crime, and you did not do so, you are indeed guilty of being an accomplice to murder, aggravated by the fact that one victim was a constable. How do you plead, Carrick of no family name?¡± Carrick did not answer. He had no defense. The crime was one he was certainly guilty of. He sat and took his medicine. Though he knew there was no chance of it, Carrick imagined that the Family stood among the crowd and watched the proceedings, giving him support. That was what real families did when one of their sons was arrested. Seeing that Carrick did not speak, neither to defend himself or to confess to his crime, the judge sighed and waved a hand in the air. ¡°I sentence Carrick of no family name to that which is required by law. He has been found an accomplice to murder in two counts and to aggravated murder in one count. He will spend the rest of his life serving the society he has scorned in the Wasteland.¡± The judge rapped his gavel against on the striking block, and Carrick was immediately pulled away as the next defendant moved up to fill his place, a young boy with a scabbed-over gash across one eyebrow. He looked as though he was about to wet himself. Carrick did not hear the outcome of that case. The two constables immediately dragged him out a back door and shoved him into the back of a transport van. Two other prisoners already sat inside it, their legs strapped to bars that ran alongside the bottom of the van, their wrists shackled to rings in the roof. They were completely unremarkable. Whatever the men had been sentenced for, it must have been something terrible, but they certainly didn''t look like the rapists or murderers who merited such a punishment as exile to the Wasteland. For that matter, Carrick didn''t either. If he¡¯d been well-dressed and well-washed and had walked down Main Street with a spring in his step and a jovial grin on his face, he would have looked like nothing else than a tall young man with sharp cheekbones and a thick head of golden hair, perhaps a young banker or the son of a politician.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Carrick saw his current reflection in the safety glass window directly across from him. No prisoner sat across from him, allowing him a good view of what the officers had done to him during interrogation. Both of Carrick¡¯s eyes were swollen. There were small cuts and gashes across his face and head, and dried blood plastered his blond hair to his head in places. His lip was split and fat, and several days¡¯ worth of stubble sprouted up in patches across his face. He had slumped over in exhaustion and pain, and seeing this, he raised himself up as best as he could. The way Carrick¡¯s arms were suspended above his head and shackled to the ceiling of the van put intense pain on his bruised shoulders, but he made no sound. Within the next hour, the constables brought only one more prisoner into the van. She was an ancient woman with a face contorted by rage. She screamed and spat at the constables as they dragged her into the seat across from Carrick. The woman seemed to have fewer than half her teeth, and her hair appeared to be pulled out in patches from her head. ¡°He deserved it!¡± she screeched. ¡°Anyone who thinks otherwise can live with him for fifty years and try to tell me he doesn''t deserve it!¡± Carrick had the feeling that whoever ¡°he¡± was, it would be impossible for anyone to live with him now. Shortly after they added the woman to the van, its engine ignited, and the vehicle¡¯s antigrav modules lifted them, wobbling, about a foot off the ground. For a few moments, the van shook though the whole thing would immediately fall apart, but eventually the engine warmed up. When the van finally moved, the trip was relatively smooth. Of the four prisoners inside the back of the van, only the woman ever spoke. She kept screaming in short bursts about how ¡°he¡± had deserved it, how if he had caught her sleeping with a man in their bed and had murdered them both, he would have gotten away with it, but even though her life was on the line every day, just because she hadn''t killed him at the moment he was beating her, she was going to die in the wastes. At some point the woman started laughing instead of screaming, explaining to no one in particular that he had finally killed her, as he had always said he would. Now she would die, and it would make him happy in Hell. Carrick tried to block it all out. That night the prisoners were allowed, one by one, to step out, quickly eat a protein bar, drink some warm water from a barrel attached to the top of the van, and stretch their legs for a few minutes before being ushered back inside. They had to sleep chained to their seats, and Carrick found this impossible. The pain in his arms and shoulders was far too great. They traveled for a good seven hours longer the next day, stopping only for one more rest. They traveled through winding country where the roads were old and poorly maintained, where there was not a building in sight. It was not until only a few hours before they arrived to that Carrick saw signs of civilization again. Situated as he was in the van, he could not see directly in the direction the van traveled, so he could not see the buildings of the camp before they approached them, but he did see the warning signs which told civilians to turn back, that they were approaching government territory, that there were land mines planted all around the road. Carrick didn''t know what a buried land mine looks like. He wondered if it was all a bluff. Eventually they passed through a thick metal fence with jagged barbs sticking out on either side of it. Weathered signs at regular distances warned that the fence was electrified. Shortly thereafter, the vehicle stopped and settled onto the ground, and guards threw open the van¡¯s cargo door and started hauling the four prisoners out. These guards were thinner and meaner-looking than the constables back in town. They seemed malnourished and exhausted. This struck terror into Carrick''s heart. If the Wasteland guards looked like beleaguered prisoners, how would the prisoners themselves look? C4 - Old Oak The old woman was separated from the rest of the group, and they put Carrick with the rest of the men as they were led into a shed. The prisoners'' clothes were cut off with shears and they were sprayed with scalding water and a pesticidal foam. They were given a bright yellow jumpsuit to put on immediately and two more of the same garment, as well as six pairs of thick and uncomfortable underclothes. Their hair was shaved close to the skull and their faces were slathered with a burning depilatory cream which, after rough scrubbing by attendant guards, caused their facial hair to fall off without the need for a razor. Carrick¡¯s face burned horribly as the rough and calloused hands of the guards scrubbed at the bruises and cuts on his face. He could not help himself now from screaming as the caustic chemicals, powerful enough to rip the hair from his face, seeped into the cracks of his wounds. The guards did not seem to enjoy the work, did not seem to take sadistic pleasure in what they did. Not that they were exactly sympathetic to the prisoners, either, but Carrick was used to constables and officers of the state taking perverse pleasure in tormenting and beating criminals. He supposed the apathy was a welcome change from that kind of treatment. Carrick tried to take a few steps after the guards finished scrubbing him, but the pain became so intense that his vision blurred and he fell down to one knee. After a few seconds he felt a sharp pain in his left arm, and then all the pain receded. ¡°Don''t get used to it,¡± one guard said. ¡°And don''t think we just carry morphine on us as a matter of happenstance. You''re not the first person to collapse from your welcoming. We got a lot of walking to do, so you best to get yourself moving.¡± The pain returned quickly, but not to the extent that it had initially crippled Carrick. He followed numbly and half-blindly behind the other prisoners, who likewise followed three guards before them. Carrick did not turn to look behind him, but he assumed more guards likewise followed him. They moved through a series of inner buildings with electrified doors separating corridors from each other before emerging again into the watery sunlight of the afternoon. The air was bitterly cold. Though it wasn''t winter back in town, they were in the North, and that the North was unnaturally cold. The failed scientists of the last generation had razed the Wasteland in what was simply referred to as the Accident. The Wasteland was a graveyard of corpses and ruins, a graveyard in whom it was now Carrick¡¯s job to dig. As they moved inward, away from the main buildings of the camp, Carrick saw buildings which he assumed were barracks forming what looks like a hobo camp. Yellow painted lines ran from the main road, which had led into the camp, to various divided groups of these barracks. The yellow then split off into red, green, and blue lines, which encircled the various groups of buildings. ¡°I will assign each of you to a color group,¡± said the guard at the front of the line. He was taller and seemingly healthier than the others. He did not wear any special uniform, but it was clear to Carrick but he was the one in charge. ¡°At the end of every day,¡± said the man, ¡°you will return to your quarters for recreation and sleep. You will never mingle with prisoners belonging to a different color group. Failure to follow this rule will result in immediate punishment.¡± However the prisoners were assigned, it didn''t seem to be evenly. Carrick was put into the Green group, and the woman was put into the Red group, but all the others were put into Blue. Carrick hadn''t exactly formed camaraderie with any of his fellow prisoners, but he still felt strangely isolated. He felt as though he were walking into an arena with a wild beast as he made his way into the group of barracks encircled by the green line. There were six of them in the Green group, none of them larger than the courthouse had been. Men sat on upturned crates or buckets around small fires which seemed to be fueled by trash. There were no electric heaters among them, even though those were cheap, solar powered things which even the poorest people back in town could afford. These men looked either as young as Carrick, perhaps in their early twenties, or very old, perhaps in their sixties or older. All their hair was cropped very short and none of them had any facial hair, though Carrick, who always took in every detail he could, noticed razor cuts on the cheeks of some of the younger men. It seemed they wouldn''t be forced to use that depilatory cream every day. Carrick had no idea what the best play was. He had an idea, though, that he should not wait for other people to take command of him. He made a split decision and marched over to the closest group of young men sitting on crates around a fire that smelled horribly like burned hair. He had nothing to sit on, so he squatted down just far enough away from the fire that someone couldn''t shove him right into it from behind.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. ¡°I''m Carrick,¡± he said. His tongue was still thick in his mouth, and he had a bit of trouble getting the words out. He was terribly thirsty. One man grunted. ¡°And why do you think you can just come over here like you own the place?¡± he asked. ¡°I''m not looking for trouble,¡± Carrick said. ¡°You haven''t earned outside time,¡± the leader of the ring said. ¡°If you''re off the clock, you clean the barracks. You got to contribute if you want respect.¡± Carrick knew he was being made an underling. His pride flared up. He was the prot¨¦g¨¦ of the Boss of the Kingfisher Family. Whatever any of these people had done, he doubted that they were people even worthy to lick the Boss¡¯ shoes. But the Boss was not here. This wasn''t the Family. This was a new place, and Carrick was little more than a worm here. He needed to not make enemies on the first day. While He needed to not make himself look like cringing crony, it was also important to pick his fights carefully. Carrick rose to his full height and stared the man down. Though he knew that the other prisoners around the ring would have their leader¡¯s back if it came to a fight, at the moment Carrick had more muscle mass and was better fed and this person. He knew that soon malnutrition and the terrible chill of the Wasteland that was already biting through his jumpsuit would render him as frail as this man, but right now, even injured as he was, Carrick could beat this arrogant man into the ground if he wanted to. He maintained eye contact for a few seconds to let that sink in. The man did not flinch. The look in his eyes told Carrick what he already knew, that Carrick would be here a very long time, that what he did right now would dictate how enjoyable his life sentence would be. Carrick smiled. ¡°Well, I want to earn that time as soon as I can,¡± he said in a friendly, even tone. ¡°Which one of the barracks needs cleaning first?¡± The man pointed to the building furthest most toward the west. ¡°Scrub the floors,¡± he said. ¡°And after that¡¯s spic and span, I earn the right to sit around a fire and burn trash with you icicles?¡± The man''s expression turned into something that was half smirk, half grimace. ¡°Hell no,¡± he said. ¡°You earn the right to sit with us icicles when you pull enough treasure to cover some other poor icicle¡¯s failure for the day. You don''t get to spend time outside until you show you can take care of someone other than yourself. That''s the only way to live here. You just look out for yourself, and you die. That''s the way they do things in the other groups, but not here. That''s why we live longer than them. We don''t have anyone who has as good of a life as some of the best people in the other groups, but we all get along as best as we can manage it together.¡± Well, Carrick hadn¡¯t expected that. ¡°Who¡¯s the boss here?¡± he asked. The man pointed to a much older fellow two fires away, who sat in a folding chair while everyone else sat on their makeshift stools. ¡°You have some respect,¡± the leader of the little ring said. ¡°Someday you might get the right to call him Old Oak, but only his friends got to do that. You will call him Mr. Oak, do you understand?¡± Carrick nodded. ¡°What do I call you?¡± he asked. ¡°I''m Teeth,¡± said the man. ¡°Is that just your friends? Do I have to call you ¡®Mr. Teeth?¡¯¡± The man laughed. He flashed a pair of what looked to be red and green resin dentures. ¡°Nah,¡± he said, ¡°you just called me teeth. Unless you got yourself in some stupid trouble, in which case you''ll be calling me Daddy.¡± Carrick nodded to Teeth and the rest of the men around the fire, turned, and made his way to the fire where sat the man named Old Oak. The fellow was ignoring Carrick as he approached, staring directly into the fire. This fire smelled better. It seemed to burn actual pieces of wood, perhaps broken bits of furniture, rather than simply trash. ¡°Mr. Oak,¡± said Carrick, ¡°Teeth suggested I speak with you.¡± Old Oak turned and looked Carrick from head to toe. He nodded twice before speaking. ¡°You''d best not cause us trouble,¡± he mumbled. ¡°Boy, you know why you''re here, don''t you? Here in the Green group?¡± Carrick swallowed. ¡°I think I do, sir.¡± He had been put in this group deliberately, apart from the other prisoners in the van. A group where, it seemed, people held each other up, rather than each man looking out for himself. It could only be that the boss had called in a favor or sent out a tremendous bribe to get Carrick into Green. He would not betray that gift. Old Oak turned back to the fire. ¡°Your job for a while, boy, is to take only the treasure that you need on a given day. We have a few hidey-holes in our territory where you''ll put any extra treasure you find. If you turned in excess yourself, you would earn yourself privileges and comforts from the guards at HQ. There''s a legend that if you bring them one of the lost artifacts at the heart of the Accident, you''d even earn your freedom. ¡°But that''s a bunch of myth and legend, and don''t think about it for more than a few seconds unless it''s what you need to give you the hope to keep going through the day. No, though you will find more treasure from time to time then you need to fill your quota, if you give it yourself in exchange for favor, you will betray every other man in this group, and your life will be forfeit. You understand?¡± ¡°I''m supposed to leave it so that if someone can''t fill their quota for the day, the extra treasure goes to them?¡± Carrick asked. The man nodded briefly. ¡°You got it. Don''t forget it. You work to help your brothers. Your brothers work to help you. It''s how we survive.¡± Carrick decided he could live with that. C5 - Hard Labor Carrick spent what seemed like hours scrubbing the floor of that barrack. At the back of the barrack was a cold water tap, buckets, brushes, and blocks of caustic white soap. There were no gloves, towels, or any other manner of cleaning equipment, though there was a drain directly underneath the faucet to allow for the dumping of waste water. Before cleaning, Carrick turned on the faucet and turned his head sideways while kneeling on the floor, drinking deeply from water so icy that it made his teeth hurt. Finally Carrick set the bucket underneath the tap and filled it halfway. He sheared off a portion of soap using the edge of the bucket and used a brush to froth up the mixture. It burned his hand mildly as it came into contact with his skin, but he¡¯d felt worse. The cleaning solution mixed, Carrick knelt and simply began scrubbing soapy water onto the floor from one end of the building to the other. The floor wasn¡¯t terribly dirty, but he knew this was more about showing a willingness to help than it was about the practical need to clean the floor. There were two floors to the building. Each had a low ceiling less than seven feet tall, leaving only a few inches of space above Carrick''s head when he stood to his full height. The bottom floor held dingy ramshackle chests built from bits and bobs, a table, a small stove with an aging electrical element powered by a fuel canister, weathered and cracked dishes, and a water kettle. Upstairs were fourteen bunks, a few more chests, and little else. Carrick wondered where he himself would sleep. All the banks were neatly made, and he couldn''t tell whether each was already claimed or whether everything was kept pristine regardless of its occupancy. Carrick eventually finished scrubbing both floors, and wondered if he should go to the next barrack and begin cleaning that one. At that point he felt utterly exhausted, and the caustic soap thoroughly scalded his hands. It was, moreover, very cold in the barrack. The hard work had kept Carrick¡¯s body temperature hot, but as he poured the soapy water down the drain at the back of the barrack and rinsed his hands free of the caustic soap with more cold water, the stillness and the chill of the running water seemed to sap all the heat from his body. Carrick shoved his hands under his armpits and shivered. He desperately wanted a cup of coffee or tea¡ªor just hot water, as the barrack probably didn''t actually have anything to put in the hot water¡ªbut he was well aware that the power canister in the stove was likely a precious resource. To have the audacity to use it without permission would be foolish. But before Carrick did anything else, foolish or wise, he needed to catch his breath for a moment. Carrick took the cleaning bucket and turned it upside down in front of the barrack¡¯s single table. He sat upon it, rested his arms on the table, and looked across the room. Carrick breathed in and out deeply, his heart wavering. He¡¯d been able to engross himself in hard work for the past hour, but now he was unable to escape the full reality that this was the first day of the rest of Carrick¡¯s life. The Boss had rewarded Carrick''s loyalty with favor, had made Carrick¡¯s sentence as good as it could possibly be, but there was no escape beyond that. The best Carrick could hope for lay in camaraderie among these other prisoners, and in finding favor with that guy called Old Oak. Maybe in time Carrick could become his second-in-command, and eventually step over him and fill the role of leader to these people. Perhaps by that point Carrick would have become used to this life and it wouldn''t bother him anymore. But the thought of an entire lifetime in the icy wastes, wearing the same jumpsuit as everyone else, cutting his hair short and standing out from the teeming mass of malnourished convicts, depressed Carrick. Though he had kept a stony face up till now, though he had endured torture and labor and humiliation and confinement without complaining, Carrick could not help himself from breaking down and crying. He sat all alone in a ramshackle building at the beginning of a frozen Wasteland. He wept at the edge of the place where thousands of men and women had lost their lives a generation ago for the hubris of dreaming they could conquer the stars. *** Carrick woke sometime later when a figure shook his shoulder. ¡°Hey, new guy,¡± said a high and wheezy voice. Carrick shook his head and blinked, looking into the bright, black eyes of a man who, despite his malnutrition, somehow looked round in the belly. His shortness provided the effect. The guy was barely taller than five feet, and he seemed concerned as he looked Carrick over. ¡°You can''t just fall asleep like that,¡± he said. ¡°Can die in the cold around here, especially if you''re not used to it. Thanks for cleaning everything up. Spic and span.¡± Carrick shrugged. ¡°It''s what I was told to do,¡± he said. ¡°Sorry. Didn''t mean to fall asleep.¡± The guy laughed. ¡°You wouldn''t be the first man to die on his first day here, but please have the good sense not to do it at the dinner table.¡± He poked a thumb upstairs. ¡°Now look, first things first. Your bed¡¯s on the left side, all the way in the back. We had a guy who didn¡¯t get along with anyone. He agreed to screw off to another barrack and let you chill with us here.¡± That sounded to Carrick like a declaration of ¡°You owe me.¡± The implication was that the round man had given something to the guy to get him to go somewhere else so Carrick could remain in that building. ¡°Why would you do that?¡± he asked. ¡°I don''t care where I go. I could have just as easily stayed anywhere else.¡± The round man shrugged. ¡°You spent your time cleaning our barracks, so you staked your claim with us. The other guys are upstairs. We all just got back from work. They''re happy to see the place clean. They¡¯ve all taken a liking to you for that. Trust me, kid, just let this happen. It''ll be good for you in the long run.¡± Carrick didn¡¯t argue. If he owed this man anything for an action which seemed for all the world to have the scent of a favor about it, he wouldn¡¯t help things any by protesting that he didn¡¯t want to owe anyone anything. ¡°I''m Carrick,¡± he said instead. ¡°I¡¯m with the Kingfishers. Here as an accomplice to murder because I¡¯m not a snitch. You heard of the Kingfishers?¡± ¡°Can''t say I have,¡± said the round man. ¡°Didn''t snitch on your brothers? That''s good. I''m here for smuggling. I didn''t have anybody to not snitch on, so I¡¯m doing my own time.¡±Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. ¡°What were you smuggling?¡± ¡°Narcotics,¡± the man said with a toothy grin. Carrick tried not to show his disgust. Though he¡¯d been grateful for the bit of morphine the guards had stuck him with earlier in the day, he had a special loathing for narcotics dealers. They destroyed lives slowly. It was a kind of torture. Carrick had distaste for many of the Family¡¯s unsavory activities, but none so much as their drug dealings. But he said nothing. This was not a place to be principled. Whatever happened in the past would stay there. So he stuck out his hand and returned a level smile. The man clasped Carrick¡¯s hand and shook it with enthusiasm. ¡°I''m Apple,¡± he said. ¡°My cheeks were red as apples when I got here, and sometimes they still are when I come right in out of the cold. So that¡¯s what you can call me.¡± Apple moved away from the table. He lit the stove and put the kettle on. He produced several thin melamine bowls from a chest and set them up around the table. ¡°We have to eat in shifts,¡± he said. ¡°Just not enough room for everyone.¡± ¡°Got it,¡± said Carrick. ¡°Anything I can do to help?¡± ¡°Nah,¡± said Apple, ¡°just sit back. Not at the table, mind you. You can eat after everyone who worked, even though you didn''t pull anything in today. In the other color groups, if you don''t work your first day, then you don''t eat your first day. They try to break you and make you want to be a good little boy.¡± When the kettle finally boiled, Apple filled a chipped mug with hot water, sprinkled a few leaves from a wooden box into it, and handed it to Carrick, who sat against the wall. ¡°Not exactly coffee,¡± said Apple, ¡°but there''s some kind of stimulant in it. It''s a weed that grows only in the Wasteland. We got people from all over the world here, and none of them have ever seen anything like it.¡± Carrick frowned and took a sip. It was astringent and sour. Could have used a lot of sugar. ¡°Why¡¯s that such a big deal?¡± he asked. ¡°It''s just a weed.¡± ¡°Well,¡± said Apple, ¡°when it''s fresh and living, it glows in the dark, and it blinks in a way that¡­¡± He stopped. ¡°This is going to sound stupid, but it feels like it''s trying to communicate with you, if you stare at it long enough.¡± Apple was pulling his leg, clearly. Carrick continued drinking the tea. A thread of energy burst through his body. It was different from the focus of caffeine. He welcomed it. ¡°Thank you,¡± he said. Apple moved back to the stove, heating more water after decanting the rest of the first kettle¡¯s boiling water into a jug. He set a spoon next to each of the bowls on the table, then took a heavy burlap sack from one of the chests in the room. From it, Apple poured a mixture of what looked like grain of various sizes and colors. He procured another small sack with bright red powder in it, and tossed a handful of this powder on top of each of the bowls. Then Apple carefully poured hot water into each bowl and mixed it with a spoon until it formed a red slurry which looked somewhat like oatmeal. The bowls prepared, Apple called the names of five of the men upstairs. The men quickly responded, each descending with a bucket or a crate upon which to sit. They placed themselves around the table, making conversation in rough, boisterous voices. Apple poured each prisoner a mug of hot water, though he didn¡¯t add any of the dried weeds. The men scarfed down their porridge and their water, vigorously scraping every bit they could from their bowls before standing and trekking back upstairs. Immediately Apple began filling the bowls with more grain and powder. He didn''t wash any of the dishes. Carrick rose and approached. ¡°You sure there isn''t anything I can do?¡± he asked. ¡°What is this stuff, anyway?¡± Apple seemed a bit annoyed. ¡°I told you no. Told you to sit back. The process works like clockwork here, and if you try to help, you''re just going to mess it up. Seriously.¡± He turned back and continued to prepare the dinner. ¡°These here¡¯s a genetically modified, par-cooked blend of five different grains and beans. You just add hot water. And this¡¯s what makes it taste palatable. Powdered tomato, lard, and red peppers. Adds a bunch of vitamins and some kind of flavor. Tastes like rancid dust by the time it gets to us, but we make do. You''ll have some in a bit. Don''t fantasize about it too much, because it tastes like utter crap.¡± Carrick nodded and stepped back. ¡°To tell the truth,¡± he said, ¡°this is better than I figured I''d be eating here.¡± ¡°It''s only the evening meal that''s even this good,¡± said Apple. ¡°Morning is just dehydrated eggs and vitamin dust. You might not be able to choke it down the first day or two. You will when you get hungry enough. The egg and vitamin¡¯s what the guards give free to everyone, along with a basic pea protein in the evenings. You can buy better supplies, like this stuff, with excess treasure.¡± Carrick nodded. ¡°And I suppose in the other color groups, only the individuals who find the extra treasure get it. They probably can afford stuff that''s even better than this stuff, and everyone else has to sit there watch them eating something it, right?¡± Apple nodded. ¡°The idea is to promote a healthy spirit of competition among the prisoners so they¡¯re actually looking for the best treasure they can find and not just trying to fill their quota as fast as possible and then be lazy every day.¡± ¡°But that''s not how we do it here,¡± Carrick said. Apple tapped the side of head. ¡°Now you''re catching on, new guy. Old Oak carefully manages our feed budget. At the end of the month, he decides what exactly we''re going to be eating for the next month. Last month we found a very valuable artifact, and we were eating dehydrated chicken for a while. That was mighty filling, even if not much tastier than everything else.¡± He closed his eyes and licked his lips. ¡°Stop distracting me,¡± he complained. ¡°I need to be making dinner for the guys.¡± Two more rounds of men arrived, ate, and moved quickly back upstairs. A couple of prisoners made cheerful introductions to Carrick, but they didn¡¯t spend much time doing it. Teeth, the man Carrick had spoken to initially, wasn¡¯t among them. Carrick found it curious that the man had sent him to this barrack when Teeth didn¡¯t even belong to it. He eventually decided it was simply that this barrack was the first in the row. After everyone else had eaten, Apple made a bowl of porridge for himself and one for Carrick, and they sat together at the table and ate more slowly than the other men had. ¡°It''s my job to cook today,¡± said Apple. ¡°It''ll be someone else''s tomorrow, will be someone else''s after that, and your turn will come up at some point. Just watch and see how it''s done for a bit. I''ll make a point to tell you the exact ratios later. The benefit of being the last to eat, being the person to cook the food, is you get to take all the time you want at the end.¡± He grinned. ¡°Also, you get to lick the bowls after.¡± That disgusted Carrick, but he knew he would change his mind after real hunger set in. He didn''t bother asking whether the cook got to take a little more food for himself. It was plainly obvious that that was one of the worst things a person could do around here. Little better than stealing treasure. The other men were already asleep by the time Apple and Carrick made their way upstairs. Apple did indeed lick the spoons and bowls clean before rinsing and then returning them to the chest. He offered to let Carrick lick some of them as well, but did not seem surprised when Carrick politely refused. There wasn¡¯t much lighting in the barracks. Tiny LEDs with solar panels sat opposite two small windows on the second floor. These only dimly illuminated portions of the room, just enough that Carrick could walk through the center of the room and to the very back where his bunk lay. He remained in the jumpsuit that he had worn since his arrival and crawled between the thin mattress and the surprisingly thick wool blanket accompanying it. The pillow seemed almost as hard as the mattress underneath, and the stink of sweat and the snores of men filled the room. Carrick doubted he could get any sleep. At least, to his surprise, it seemed that care had been taken to make the insulate the bunks. Carrick soon became cozily warm, and drifted almost against his will into deep sleep. C6 - Frozen Standing Up Carrick woke to a familiar, mumbling voice while someone shook his shoulder. ¡°Time to get up, new guy. Can''t be wasting moonlight.¡± Carrick blinked, disoriented. He had no idea how long he''d been asleep. Since he¡¯d lost the previous night''s sleep on the journey to the camp, and he¡¯d hardly slept after his beating in the interrogation cell, Carrick was desperately behind on rest. His head pounded as though he¡¯d enjoyed a fantastic evening with an aggressive quantity of liquor. Sleep deprivation was a much less enjoyable drug than alcohol. He rationalized all of this a minute or two after the fact. It took Carrick a bit to remember exactly where he was. Apple was trying to talk to him, but Carrick, disoriented, couldn¡¯t quite understand the words. Eventually Carrick got the gist that he needed to make his bed and follow downstairs. Being new, he was given the privilege of being one of the first to eat breakfast that morning. Breakfast was unoffensive and tasteless, which was for the best, considering Carrick¡¯s stomach roiled in response to the splitting pain in his head. He forced down a bowl of gelatinous, rehydrated egg topped with a little salt, powdered molasses, and a spice blend that might have been black pepper and cardamom. He drank a mug of the stimulant tea from the previous night, and after washing that down, knew that it was in his best interest to rehydrate with several more mugs full of icy water. He felt better after getting food and water inside him, and the intense pain which the water provoked seemed to suppress his headache. He rolled his shoulders and hopped up and down a few times, trying to get the blood flowing. Apple was one of the first wave of men to eat breakfast. Afterward, he pointed toward the door. ¡°Come on, new guy. Don''t spend all your energy right away. We don''t have anything warm for the run to the crawler, but at least there''s some heat in it. Just, uh, try to not get frostbitten before then.¡± Carrick only nodded. He realized his only chance for survival in the short term was to follow exactly everything that Apple commanded. This was not a time for posturing and for showing that he would not be pushed around. This was a time for figuring out exactly how to be a productive member of what was essentially a new kind of Family. ¡°Later,¡± Apple said, ¡°when you get more used to the work, you might go out by yourself, if you prefer it. A crawler can hold up to two people in the seats, and on very rare occasions when a big piece of treasure is found that two people can''t quiet move on their own, sometimes a third person will wrap himself up as warm as he can and sit in the cargo hold, but that¡¯s pretty goddamn risky. Never agree to it if anyone asks you until you know what you''re getting yourself into. You get me?¡± Carrick really didn''t get it, but he nodded, confident that he would figure it out in time. They stepped outside the barracks, and Carrick immediately saw what Apple meant by ¡°wasting moonlight.¡± The time was not even remotely that of day. The sky was dark, and a gorgeous sweep of stars spread across the sky. A nearly full moon watched them from above. its beauty was lost on Carrick, for with the darkness came an intense chill like nothing had ever experienced before. Even on the occasions when he had been required to walk around the town where the Family operated in the winter with very little protective clothing, that winter freeze was nothing like this. Winters in the town never dropped far below the point of freezing, but it had to be much colder than that here. The mucus in Carrick¡¯s nose froze even as he breathed heavily in and out, and the tips of his ears and his nose burned. Even Carrick¡¯s eyes felt as though they were freezing in his skull. Apple pointed past the barracks toward the line of the Wasteland, in the opposite direction from the road leading into the camp. ¡°Now, we''re going to keep running in a straight direction,¡± he said. ¡°Our crawler today will be number 17 Green. You''ll recognize it because there''ll be a big green glowing stripe of paint underneath the number 17. You¡¯re gonna run to the right side of the cab, pull down the sleeve of your suit so your skin doesn''t touch the bare metal, and yank open the handle. You''ll jump in and slam the door behind you. You understand?¡± Carrick swallowed hard, nodded, and took in a deep breath. ¡°Now!¡± roared Apple, and sprinted in that direction. Carrick ran after him. He wore the shoes he¡¯d arrived in. It only registered to him now. It seemed odd to Carrick that they had given him new clothes and underclothes, but had allowed Carrick to keep his shoes. They were fine loafers, wonderful for sauntering about town, but he wished that he''d had the forethought to switch them out for a pair of strong boots before the fateful job which had led to his arrest.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. There was no changing the past, however, so Carrick ran in wholly inadequate shoes across glare ice and wispy snow as he followed the deceptively elegant Apple. They passed between small buildings and lumps of things frozen under snow onto a tremendous lot of asphalt upon which was a looming fleet of slow, wide trucks, each blazed with luminescent paint in a combination of different colors and numbers, just as Apple had said. Apple dashed toward one in particular, apparently having memorized its location from the previous day. Carrick skidded on the frozen ground but somehow kept himself from falling. He moved around to the right side of the truck and did as Apple had instructed, pulling the sleeve of his right arm over his hand and using the protected portion to yank open the stiff latch of the truck door. As the engine was still off, the truck rested on the ground, and Carrick was able to simply step into the cab without having to pull himself up. Finally inside, he slammed the door behind him. Apple was already keying the ignition. He jabbed at the button four times with a sausage-like finger, one of the many parts of him which seemed swollen and skinny at the same time. ¡°Come on, come on,¡± he muttered. Finally, the engine ignited with a spidery keening, and the antigrav modules dragged the truck slowly a few inches into the air. Heating coils began to vibrate inside Carrick¡¯s seat and all around him, beginning the slow task of turning the inside of the cab into something other than a deep freezer. ¡°All right, all right,¡± muttered Apple. ¡°That''s the hardest part.¡±. He turned to Carrick, a big grin on his face. ¡°We¡¯ll be warm so long as we''re in here.¡± He engaged the controls, and the truck rumbled through the numerous rows of the lot. Men all around them were also entering their vehicles, and, Carrick was fairly certain, some women, too. Though each prisoner''s head was shaved, and malnourishment had robbed the prisoners of much of their muscle and fat, he seemed to notice some similarity to the female form in the prisoners approaching red-coded trucks. Apple finally pulled the truck out of the lot altogether, and drove toward what Carrick had not previously noticed but now saw as a maw-like ramp leading downward into the ground. He looked beyond it, to the Wasteland stretching as far as the eye could see like an ocean of ice, snow and the occasional, crumbled remains of buildings. Apple flipped on navigational lights that flooded the ground before them as they made a smooth descent down the ramp, which was wide enough for six of the trucks to move abreast, and tall enough that perhaps three could be stacked upon each other without scraping the roof of the tunnel. There were no lights illuminating the inside of the tunnel, but as darkness consumed them, the taillights of other tracks glowed like stars far beyond them. ¡°What on Earth are we doing?¡± asked Carrick. ¡°I know prisoners in the Wasteland recover the artifacts of the Accident, but they built all of that on the surface, right? Why aren''t we going out to find things that might be preserved in the ice?¡± Apple snorted. ¡°People who came long before you and me scraped up everything worth getting from the surface a long time ago. It turns out that a lot of the facilities dug far into the ground. There are all these tunnels, what almost seem like mazes. Almost like someone wanted poor fools like us to get lost down here. ¡°That''s where we do our business these days. It''s going to be a bit of a drive before we get to the site that I''ve been working on. I feel like we have it easier in some ways than the prisoners who had to work on the surface. It''s warmer down here. Back in the old days, they''d have the prisoners walking around almost completely exposed, digging with power tools by hand, trying to rip stuff out of the ice. Was a much higher death rate back then, I understand. There''s a bit of an oral history that gets passed down from one batch of prisoners to the other, you know? Some of them talk about prisoners who froze right to the ground, standing up and all alone. ¡°On the other hand, the quotas weren''t as bad back then. The treasures have gotten scarcer as we keep grabbing the easiest stuff to find, and the government keeps wanting more, more, more.¡± Carrick nodded. ¡°And for the people in the other color groups, everyone has to fend for himself. That''s got to be really scary for them.¡± Apple sighed. ¡°Yep.¡± ¡°Why don''t the other groups work like Green group does?¡± Asked Carrick. ¡°Where I come from, everybody does whatever they can for the guy in charge, and the guy in charge looks after everybody like they''re his own kids.¡± ¡°Yeah, you were in one of those crime families.¡± Apple shrugged. ¡°I guess they weren''t able to keep you from getting thrown here.¡± ¡°They got me thrown in with the right group of people at least,¡± Carrick said quietly. Apple laughed. ¡°Well,¡± he said, ¡°It¡¯s contrary to most people''s sensibilities to take something they rightfully earned, something they deserve, and give it to other people who didn''t do the same work they did. If someone''s too lazy or too stupid to fill their quota, maybe they shouldn''t eat. That''s the way the other groups look at it. If anyone survives, it''s because they worked hard enough and they were smart enough to do it.¡± ¡°And so people go hungry, and that makes it harder for them to do their work the next day,¡± said Carrick. ¡°And then they die underground somewhere and eventually the truck is recalled with an autopilot routine,¡± Apple replied. ¡°Well,¡± said Carrick, ¡°I''ll tell you this freely, Apple. I want to rise as high as I can, all the way to the top. I''d never want someone to go hungry if I could help it, but everything I do is going to be for the sake of getting the most respect I can. I won''t forget that you''re the one who took me under your wing to begin with when I get there.¡± ¡°Oh, shut up,¡± said Apple amiably. ¡°We¡¯ll see if your talk about respect and all that holds up after a day or two where you''re be lucky to see the sun for an hour a day.¡± Carrick said nothing more for the remainder of their trip. The warmth of the cab, the silence, and the gentle motion of Apple¡¯s driving quickly lulled Carrick into a doze. By the time Apple smacking him in the face to wake him, Carrick had no idea how much time had passed under the earth. C7 - To Fail to Touch the Stars ¡°Up and at ¡®em, sunshine,¡± said Apple. ¡°I''m afraid waking up twice in one morning doesn''t earn you twice as many breakfasts. Get on out and grab a plasma pick.¡± Carrick scrambled for the latch to his door, opened it, and stumbled out. He nearly broke his ankle. Assuming in his stupor that the truck would be on the ground, he lurched out and fell half a foot to the ground below, which was gritty, sandy stone. He grabbed onto the door and took a few deep breaths to regain his bearings. Apple walked around the truck and disengaged a latch on the side of the cargo bay. The panel swung upward, revealing numerous pairs of worn and dingy tools. He pulled two long, metal rods from their housings and gave one to Carrick. ¡°I don''t know if you''ve ever used one of these before,¡± he said, ¡°but just point the thin end at whatever you needed to excavate, and move the lever with your thumb. It engages at low power at the beginning of the action, and with much more power than you''ll ever need at the other end.¡± He demonstrated, gently moving the lever on the side of the tube just a fraction with his thumb. A thin beam of bright plasma appeared at the tip, like the big brother to a cigarette lighter. Apple lowered the pick until the tip contacted the ground, and a high-pitched sound emanated from it as the plasma, rather than melting the ground underneath, seemed to scatter debris as it chipped away at the stone. ¡°All right,¡± said Carrick. ¡°What are we doing with them?¡± ¡°I excavated a path to an old computer bank yesterday,¡± said Apple. He pointed with his pick toward a far wall. Carrick took proper stock of his surroundings. They stood in a tunnel much narrower than the one they had traveled along earlier, one which allowed only a bit of space above and to either side of the truck. The floor underneath them, he realized after shuffling some dirt away with his foot, was a matrix of stone tiles like that of a hotel lobby. What seemed to be a great mass of polished stone unlike the walls of the tunnel lay before them, and through this massive stone was indeed a carved a passage just large enough for a man to walk through. LEDs had been stuck to the sides of both tunnels, casting a bit of illumination. Apple pulled an LED headlamp from the toolbox and gave it to Carrick before strapping one to his own head. ¡°All the stuff is recharged by an inductive pad thing underneath the crawler lot during the night,¡± he said. ¡°We''ll have to pull the lights off the walls before we head back. You can leave them up for a day or so, but that¡¯s all.¡± Carrick followed behind Apple as the man waddled through the narrow tunnel. Carrick was not claustrophobic, but a feeling of dread settled into the pit of his stomach as they moved through tons upon tons of rock which seemed already to have crashed down from the surface into whatever recess this was down under the earth. At any moment, it seemed to Carrick, a small shift could bring the whole mass down upon them, and they would be buried forever in the heart of the earth, never to be seen by anyone ever again. But it didn''t come crashing down. Eventually they reached the end of the tunnel, perhaps ten minutes¡¯ walk inward. It eventually led into a room which looked so similar to an ordinary laboratory you might find in a university that it gave Carrick an uncanny sense that he was back home, breaking into some facility at night to steal a bit of top-secret research. He had to put his hand against the wall and take a few deep breaths while Apple gave him an odd look. ¡°You okay?¡± he asked. Carrick nodded. ¡°I just didn''t expect it to look so normal.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± said Apple. ¡°It''s weird the first few times you see it. A lot of the underground parts of the facilities weren''t damaged very much. There¡¯s that big ol¡¯ stone monument you saw earlier that came down through a few chambers after the explosion, but it missed most of the surrounding chambers. I already took everything worth getting from the closer ones, but you can help me get the components of this big computer.¡± They moved carefully around dust-choked tables and chairs. Shapes that could only be those of dried corpses littered the ground. They lay in positions which seemed to show they had run around for a few minutes before keeling over, rather than starving slowly. That was oddly comforting to Carrick. ¡°How much do you know about the Accident?¡± asked Carrick. ¡°I guess you must have found some information down here over the years. You and the other prisoners.¡± ¡°I haven''t really found anything myself,¡± said Apple. ¡°To tell you the truth, I can''t really read.¡± He chuckled. ¡°I bring back information sometimes, but it always has to go to the big shots in HQ. I guess they really want information and data more than physical treasures. Seems pretty clear to me they think they can use the information to replicate whatever the Accident was trying to accomplish.¡± Carrick¡¯s heart pounded. ¡°They''re going to try the same thing over again? They''ll just cause another Accident!¡± ¡°Not my problem,¡± said Apple. ¡°I imagine we¡¯ll both be long dead before then. But anyway, the legends we prisoners have passed down, you know, from the bits of information we¡¯ve found over the years, talk about a machine that was supposed to be able to transform an entire planet. The experiment was supposed to use that machine to transform some stuff into a perfect fuel that would let us make a kind of plane that could go into space. We think the result was supposed to be taking that plane to other planets and turning them into copies of Dirt. I guess that would just mean a bunch of rich people buying planets of their own and not letting anyone else on, right?¡± Something stirred in Carrick¡¯s heart. Though he had never been particularly entranced by outer space, he¡¯d always found the idea of an infinite universe filled with other stars and planets interesting, at the very least. That there might be other alien races out there, ones who might themselves have figured out how to traverse the stars, who might give their knowledge to other worlds, was intriguing. That humans had apparently come so close to fulfilling that role themselves chilled Carrick. There was beauty to it. It added a new layer of tragedy to all the lives lost during the Accident, the gigantic explosion which had ripped apart the atmosphere above what was now known as the Wasteland and destroyed the lives of everyone who had worked to take humanity off Dirt and into the stars. ¡°Hey new guy, stop looking dazed and come help me,¡± said Apple. Carrick shook his head and followed. Apple stood before towering metal box that looked like an industrial computing tower. Though it had no monitor or output display, it was covered with gleaming buttons, and there seemed to be data ports all over it. Stretched from one face of it across the wall, cables connected it to two smaller metal boxes that likewise recovered in buttons and ports. ¡°I¡¯m having trouble finding maintenance seam,¡± said Apple. ¡°But I figure you''re part of a crime family, so you probably broke into safes and vaults all over the place. You can probably figure out better than I can the best place to start.¡± Carrick looked it over. There was indeed a seam that appeared to have been delicately welded shut along one edge. It would indeed have been easy to miss for someone without his skilled attention to detail. ¡°Right here. It wasn¡¯t designed to come apart after assembly.¡± Carrick grinned and hefted his plasma pick. ¡°Good thing we have these.¡± He carefully dragged the pick¡¯s ¡°flame¡± across the base of the machine where it met the floor. He was used to small, hand-held cutting tools which sent jarring vibrations through his hand and forearm, but compared to those, the plasma pick was a dream. Instead of vibrating in his hand, it produced a rattling noise as the housing of the machine or the computer itself vibrated, its molecules breaking apart as Carrick dragged the pick across its welded seam. While Carrick worked on the base, Apple separated the adjacent vertical seam, and soon they could peel apart the panel and reveal the innards of the computer. Two stacks of hard drives sat inside, each nestled into its own cradle. The drives on the left side seem to have been damaged in some kind of electrical fire, and were scorched and blackened. The drives on the right side, however, appeared perfectly fine. Carrick felt giddy. ¡°That''s got to be tons of information! How much of our quota will that fill?¡±Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Apple shrugged. ¡°Not as much as you might think,¡± he said. ¡°I guess the drives in big computers like this are almost impossible to read, so they''re not considered very valuable. They''ll probably just get auctioned off to some collector by the government. I was really hoping we¡¯d find a big processor or something in here. That tends to be what¡¯s worth a lot.¡± Oh well. Carrick began carefully pulling drives out of their cradles and setting them on a nearby table. ¡°We have anything to take them back with?¡± ¡°Yep, look at this.¡± Apple had grabbed several more small tools and a tool belt before they¡¯d departed, and he now unhooked a small antigrav module from his belt. He placed it on top of the stack of intact hard drives and then lifted the stack from the bottom so it was no longer touching the table. The grav field adhered to the whole mass of the stack, letting it hover at about chest height. ¡°Leave the broken drives,¡± said Apple. ¡°Not even collectors want those.¡± He sounded bitterly disappointed. Carrick realized he must have been really banking on the idea of finding a processor. Carrick took a step back and looked around the room. ¡°Are we going to look at any more of these things over here?¡± He gestured to the smaller boxes connected to the data bank they had ripped open. "Nah,¡± said Apple. ¡°All the cables are probably just power cells. That''s one area of tech that we''ve improved since back when the Accident happened. All the batteries and power systems they used back then used chemicals. They don''t have energy in them now, and even if they did, it''s not like we could use them for anything. It''s another thing collectors don''t want.¡± Carrick squinted hard at one box in particular. It had a vent on the side. ¡°Even that one?¡± he asked. Apple glanced at it. ¡°Why? Does it look different than any of the others?¡± ¡°Well, that there looks like a cooling vent. Might have a processor in it. Have you never realized that?¡± Apple frowned. ¡°Just looks like a grate to me.¡± He sounded doubtful. Carrick walked up and used his plasma pick to cut away the front panel of the box. He had to reach up to do it, as it was mounted above his head. The panel clanged against the floor, and Carrick took a jump back. There, as he¡¯d expected, was a circuit board topped with the unmistakable cooling fan of a central processing unit. ¡°That''s what it was,¡± he said in triumph. Carrick turned to Apple, who had a look of utter disbelief on his face. ¡°I''ve seen small units like this one even in modern buildings. They''re not a part of the main processor, so they can run subsystems of a facility like life support and data redundancy. About ten years ago there was a computer virus that killed killing a lot of people because it shut down every system of a bunch of buildings at once. The places that survived used this same old method of decentralizing the computers. It''s not as efficient for most things, but where you need redundancy, you use them.¡± Apple stared in wonder at the box. ¡°All this time,¡± he whispered. ¡°There''s got to be hundreds of them out there.¡± ¡°And no one else has realized this?¡± Carrick asked. ¡°That¡¯s hard to believe.¡± ¡°Most people who end up in the Wasteland don''t know about things like that,¡± said Apple. ¡°We know tools. We know practical stuff. We know some information that the people who came before passed down to us, but we''re not scientists.¡± ¡°I''m not either,¡± said Carrick. ¡°I just sometimes have to pretend to be one for a job.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± said Apple. He moved forward and pulled a chair from one of the dust-covered tables. ¡°I really hope this holds me,¡± he muttered. Despite its age, the chair did not break. It allowed Apple to stand on it and carefully disconnect the processor¡¯s power cable. He gave it a sharp tug and it ripped away from the motherboard. ¡°They don''t care about the old computer boards,¡± said Apple. ¡°Mostly. Just the processors, and a handful of components that I¡¯ll tell you about later. You''ll know them if you see them. They''re about the size of your hand.¡± That was all so odd to Carrick. ¡°You¡¯d think they''d want all the bits and pieces they can get.¡± ¡°They''ve gotten most of the little bits and bobs they wanted a long time ago. It seems like a colossal waste to you and me, but eventually you¡¯ve just got to not think about it too hard. The people benefiting from us operate on a scale you and I can''t even imagine.¡± Try not to think about it. That sounded dangerous to Carrick. That sounded like the kind of thinking that led you to ignore hundreds or thousands of valuable processors that could have been sitting right in front of you, because you just didn''t bother to ask questions. Whatever Apple said, Carrick would never let himself simply not think about it. They looked carefully through the rest of the chamber but found no more of the decentralized processors. They finally cut through the wall into a service tunnel that was tangled with blackened wires, one which Apple said was still too dangerous to attempt to traverse, in case there happened to be an active power cell connected somewhere. They next cut into a room adjacent to the first, which seems very much like that first one. This room likewise had no computer, but it did have a box full of rock crystals which, after they wiped thick dust from their surfaces, revealed themselves to be a beautiful, transparent blue. Apple said these could be used for the manufacturing of lasers, and that it would, along with what they had already found, be enough to fulfill both their quotas for the day. Carrick began walking toward the back of that chamber, preparing to cut into the wall, but Apple stopped him. ¡°Look, new guy, thanks for the help, but you''re not used to this. You get some sleep now. I''m going to keep going. I''ll do whatever I can for the rest of the workday. You just go back to the crawler with our stuff and put it away, then get in the cab and sleep until I come back. You''ll get tough enough to do this is long as you need to later, but I can still see that you''re exhausted. Anything else I do today will be a bonus. You got it?¡± ¡°Come on,¡± said Carrick, ¡°I''m not a week or lazy.¡± He needed to appear strong. He needed to be useful. He needed to not let anyone think he would let them down. Apple shook his head firmly. ¡°No. Your body doesn''t know what it''s in for yet. Go take a nap or I''ll knock you out myself.¡± Carrick didn''t argue any further. He heard earnestness in Apple¡¯s voice. He didn''t hear any cunning, any hints that Apple might be plotting to make him look bad in front of everyone else. So Carrick carried the box of crystals between his hands and used the side of the box to push ahead the hard drives in their antigrav field as he made his way back through the narrow tunnel to the crawler. It felt strange to be alone. Not having another human nearby made Carrick feel like an insect in a burrow. Back at the truck, Carrick opened the bay door in the back. There were boxes bolted onto the floor of the bay, each lined with some kind of soft padding, and sheets of padding were stacked around them. Carrick nestled the hard drives into one box, wrapping them with padding, and then did his best to divide the crystals up between remaining boxes so they wouldn''t crash into each other and break on the way back. He slammed the door, then stood in the dim LED light for a few moments, thinking about how it was so much warmer down here than it was on a surface. It almost felt as though he were simply in an ordinary building''s basement. Carrick had a fleeting fantasy of resurrecting the functions of these facilities and living a life with the rest of the prisoners down here, one where they were human beings in their own society, not the prisoners of a government that existed simply to rip anything they achieved away from them at the end of every day. Of course, that could never work. It was impossible to grow food under the ground, he was fairly certain. The prisoners relied on the government to give them everything. He opened the cab door. The truck, by now, rested on the ground. He got into the seat, closed the door, and keyed the ignition. Soon the coolness of the cab turned to warmth and Carrick fell into sleep. When Carrick next woke, he was back in the truck lot. Apple had not woken him upon returning. The sun outside was low, though it had not even been close to rising when they had first set out. Carrick was not prepared to move from the heat of the cab to the deathly cold outside. It felt as though the life was ripped directly from his body. At the very least, the hard drives had absorbed the warmth of the truck, and Carrick wrapped his fingers around them despite as he and Apple made their way slowly, carefully, back toward the main buildings of the camp. ¡°How long was the journey?¡± asked Carrick. He felt completely disoriented by the fact that he had slept both to and from the work site. ¡°As far as we have to travel these days, almost four hours each way.¡± Apple''s voice was grim. ¡°Just a year ago,¡± he said, ¡°it was only barely three hours. The buildings we were scavenging at that point had hardly anything in them. We had to press further and further out.¡± The implication in his voice was clear. Eventually, they would run out of scavenge even as far as they were spread out now. The guards would force the prisoners to push even further. As their quotas would likely not diminish, they would trade more and more sleeping time for travel. Perhaps that was why, more than any other reason, prisoners traveled in pairs. Maybe they traded time spent sleeping and driving. One guy toward, the other guy from. Carrick felt guilty. If that was true, he had forced Apple to drive both directions. Was that a thing now that he owed Apple? He would have to pay it back as soon as he could. ¡°So do you think there will be a point,¡± Carrick asked, ¡°when they have to build a new camp further inward?¡± ¡°Everyone''s kind of wondered why they haven''t done it already,¡± said Apple. ¡°The Accident itself happened quite a ways out. Hundreds of miles. You can''t even begin to imagine the scope of everything they were doing, new guy. There were tens of thousands of people working on that thing.¡± Carrick shuddered. No one ever talked about the Accident back in the real world. Perhaps ¡°real¡± was an odd term for it, but it was what Carrick felt. Everybody knew about the history of the event a generation ago, but it was a bit of a taboo subject. There was some superstitious belief among everyone, from beggars to business executives, that the spirits of those killed in the Accident were drawn to haunt people who talked about them, particularly at night. It was further believed that their spirits haunted technology, drawn to the things they had spent and given their lives for a generation ago. ¡°They''ve got to be wasting so much time,¡± said Carrick. Apple shrugged. ¡°I guess. Not my place to bother about it. At the very least, I doubt there''s so little work that it¡¯ll dry up in either of our lifetimes. Even if they force us to pack some food and drive out for a day at a time, do some work, and then drive back, we won¡¯t run out completely.¡± They reached the back of a long line of prisoners holding the treasures they had scavenged over the course of the day, and fell silent. C8 - Dont Lose Your Way They finally arrived at a long line of men and some women, each person holding onto some box or stack of components. This line passed in front of a low building with an overhang where one guard stood alongside an intricate contraption which looked something like a power generator and asked for a name and an explanation of what sort of treasure the prisoner brought with them. ¡°Treasure¡± was a funny word. Most of what the prisoners seemed to carry was old junk, occasionally useful for research or for some rich collector to preen over. The word ¡°treasure¡± conjured up ideas of pirates and secrets, but treasure hunting meant little more than digging through the trash of people long dead. When Carrick¡¯s turn in line came, the attendant guard looked him over with an unchanging expression. He was a sour-faced man with a yellow tinge to his face. He looked at the number on Carrick¡¯s jumpsuit, then asked for his name. Carrick gave it, and the man marked off the combination on his datapad. That this seemed to be the only method of roll call puzzled Carrick. He knew that in more typical prisons, roll call was often performed three times a day, and much more strictly, with each prisoner standing in a line to ensure no one was missing. In fact, the amount of freedom the prisoners received in the Wasteland staggered Carrick. Not only did security at the barracks seem to be free, but the prisoners had access to heavy vehicles and to power equipment which could easily tunnel outward or cut through the fence. Though many guards occupied the camp, what exactly stopped prisoners from using the tools which they were given for scavenging to instead escape from their prison? It wasn''t even as though any of the prisoners wore some kind of suicide collar which could kill them if they went missing. The guard snapped his fingers directly in front of Carrick¡¯s face. ¡°Your cargo,¡± he snarled. ¡°What do you have, prisoner?¡± Apple dipped his head around Carrick¡¯s shoulder to address the guard. ¡°Good evening, Mr. Jones! I''m showing the new prisoner around. He worked with me today. We found some hard drives and some of these here laser crystals. Not sure what grade they are, but look pretty valuable to me!¡± The guard gestured for Carrick to set his load on the bed of the machine beside him. Now that he was closer, the machine appeared to Carrick like a scale and a set of measuring tools. The guard pulled a monitor arm toward himself, examining something closely, and then gave a brief nod. ¡°High chance of filling your quota from this,¡± he said. ¡°But we won''t know till we do analysis.¡± Despite his gruffness, the words seem to be for Carrick¡¯s benefit, a way of explaining the ordinary process. Apple grab Carrick shoulder. ¡°You¡¯ve got to ask for a receipt if they don''t give you an answer right away,¡± he whispered. ¡°If this stuff is worth more than our quota and we''re not here to witness it, HQ will just take whatever extra it''s worth and we¡¯ll never see a penny of it.¡± Carrick cleared his throat. ¡°May I have a receipt so I can check on the analysis later?¡± He kept his voice as respectful as possible. The guard grunted and ripped a cellophane ticket from the machine. He shoved it into the collar of Carrick''s jumpsuit. Carrick began to move forward, but another guard who stood nearby raised a snub-nosed rifle and pointed at Carrick¡¯s chest. ¡°Stand still, prisoner!¡± Apple stepped away from Carrick. ¡°They''ve got to make sure you''re not hiding anything,¡± he mumbled. ¡°Just put your arms to the sides for a second.¡± Carrick did as Apple said, even as the armed guard shouted the same instructions. The first the guard who had taken the treasures approached with a wand which he swiped up and down Carrick¡¯s left and right sides. ¡°Clean,¡± he said. ¡°No contraband, no radiation.¡± The armed guard lowered his weapon and pointed away with his chin. ¡°Move on,¡± he said. Carrick obeyed. Apple stopped for just a moment, raised his arms, and submitted to a scan before following Carrick. ¡°Not a bad job,¡± he said. ¡°You''re lucky you didn''t get someone with a mean temper. Some people on their first day get a bad guard or they''re just belligerent and won''t listen. They get kicked down and beaten a bit before being sent back to the barracks with their whole quote confiscated and nullified. Not a great way to start your sentence.¡± Carrick retrieved and examined the cellophane ticked he¡¯d been given. It had a dot matrix code upon it and nothing else. ¡°Will I just show this again to them tomorrow night?¡± ¡°You got it,¡± said Apple. ¡°Be careful with stuff like this. You have to kind of get a scale in your head of how much things are worth. You''re allowed to ask for a re-scan if you think it''s evaluated too low, but they also have a right to knock your teeth out if you don¡¯t show respect.¡± As they approached the Green group barracks, Carrick saw men sitting around fires again. He recognized both Teeth and Old Oak, but didn¡¯t catch either man¡¯s attention. ¡°So when do I get the right to sit around fires outside?¡± he asked. Apple looked at the men and then turned back to Carrick. ¡°I don''t know why you''d want to,¡± he said. ¡°They make it out to be some kind of privilege because it''s just about the only freedom they have. Fire doesn''t keep you that warm, not with all this wind around. I prefer to be inside, myself. But¡­ When you find some treasure that''s more than your quote is worth, and it''s something you can divide up, then you''ll leave it in a tunnel I''ll show you. Then you come back and tell Mr. Oak. He''ll organize who takes it back for surplus and arrange for extra supplies for the whole group. Keeps some kind of a reckoning in his head. When he decides that you¡¯ve pulled your weight enough, he graduate you to brother of the Green group, and you''re then allowed to sit outside and freeze your ass off.¡± Apple smiled. ¡°I wouldn¡¯t bother if I was you. Play along, help, and don''t pretend that sitting on a barrel outside means you''re worth anything special.¡± They approached the Green barracks at a jog. Standing still in line had rendered Carrick almost completely numb. The guards had worn thick gloves and face coverings, a privilege not afforded to any of the prisoners. Carrick thought about that as he looked at the trash fires and the shivering shoulders and backs of men trying to pretend they were the elite of a group of convicts. *** The next day, Carrick stayed awake for the whole drive to the tunnel. At a certain point the main tunnel split into several branches, and Apple took the third one. The slope dropped significantly as they traveled, and eventually the path opened into what seemed like a subway tunnel. Ancient, unlit light fixtures hung from the sides of the tunnel, and maintenance tunnels with their hatches cut away appeared in the truck¡¯s lights from time to time. ¡°This was all here before we came,¡± said Apple. ¡°Used to be some kind of underground transportation system that took people from one part of the facility to the other. Now we use it. There are ghost stories about still hearing trains or voices down here, but I''ve never heard them myself. At least, nothing that can¡¯t be chalked up to echoes of other people passing by. We''ve dug out a lot of those maintenance tunnels and connected the parts to each other so we can get around better.¡±This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Apple pointed to one of the cut-away tunnels which, to Carrick, seemed little different to any of the others. ¡°That''s our closest warehouse.¡± ¡°How on Dirt do you remember where all these things are?¡± Asked Carrick. Everything was so featureless. It wasn''t like navigating through even the most winding slums of his home town, where land markers stood out every few yards and a person even had street signs to help navigate. It was almost as though the prisoners had developed some kind of animalistic navigation system, like moles or worms. Apple tapped the dashboard of the truck. ¡°Eventually just got a feel of how long it took to get from one point to another,¡± he said. ¡°But we also have a waypoint system built into this thing.¡± He pulled out what had looked like a cup holder to Carrick, revealing a very simple LCD display. Upon that display was a simple 3D representation of what had to be the tunnel systems. A moving green dot marked what Carrick assumed was their position, and scattered around were orange dots which stayed in place. ¡°Those are our warehouses,¡± said Apple. ¡°Green group owns this whole section of the facility. And you see that one yellow dot there?¡± Carrick had to squint to discern the difference, but he did eventually see it was a shade lighter. ¡°That''s the site that you''re working on?¡± he asked. Apple nodded. ¡°Yep. Work sites don¡¯t show up on the scanner by default, because you''d never be able to see anything else if that was the case. If you press this little button here, it¡¯ll pulse out a wave and show you locations that haven''t already been marked yet. That''s really the only way to find a fresh place to dig. It''s, uh, good manners not to intrude on someone else''s site. Even as much as it''s every man for himself among the other groups, to intrude on someone else''s worksite is an invitation to get murdered.¡± Apple wasn''t smiling. He turned back to the truck''s viewport. ¡°And no one will turn you in for it, either. I''m warning you, Carrick, whatever you think about getting on top and being some kind of boss down here, you do not touch other people''s things.¡± Carrick had no intention to. He got it. Turf was sacred. ¡°Well,¡± he said, ¡°thanks for sharing yours with me.¡± Apple shrugged. ¡°It¡¯ll be useful to have help. I like going out alone, but someone had to help you, and it''ll be nice to take a nap on the way back. Don''t think you''re getting out of driving this time.¡± ¡°So long as you don''t mind getting lost forever,¡± said Carrick. Apple laughed. *** The next week passed in a blur. Carrick had to rely completely on the trucks wayfinder, though at least he found it fairly intuitive to use. His days were filled with the same food, the same rigid schedule, with chambers which looked nearly identical to each other and filled with the same old technology and components. Carrot had a tough time keeping track of which day was which, and when the day which Apple said was Sunday finally came, it was a bit of a shock. On that day, all the prisoners lined up before their barracks in a more formal roll call than the daily one. Guards drove a dump truck from one end of the barracks to the other, and each prisoner deposited their bedding and all the clothes except for the set which they currently wore into the back. A few hours later, new sets of bedding and jumpsuits were deposited on a wooden pallet before each of the barracks. Apple said the old clothing and bedding was recycled or burned, something about residual radiation. It turned out Sunday was also the one day of the week the prisoners were not scheduled to work. It was the day Old Oak assembled and updated what passed for their finances. The rest of men loafed around inside and out of the barrack, drank tea, played games with crude dice and other gaming objects, or simply slept. On his second Sunday, Carrick, Apple, and two other men from the barrack whom Carrick had made friends with sat around their barracks table. They played a game more or less like dominoes, using pieces made from similarly shaped rocks. Apple was talking about how one of the other men, named Bigfoot, need to cover a day of cooking in payback for when Apple head covered for him on some previous day. Bigfoot was trying to say he didn''t owe Apple anything, that Apple had just been returning a favor he owed Bigfoot in the first place. Bored with the argument, Carrick rose and moved away to refill his mug with hot water when he heard a gurgle and then yelling from behind him. He spun, spattering himself with boiling water that he hardly felt as he saw Apple had fallen across the table and was convulsing, holding his throat. Carrick rushed over. Bigfoot was already shoving his fingers it down Apple''s throat, clearly trying to induce vomiting. ¡°Get a guard!¡± Bigfoot shouted. He turned and looked directly at Carrick. ¡°Go on, jackass! Stop standing there!¡± The last prisoner in the room was drawing cold water from the tap, and he rushed over to Apple as Carrick burst out the door. He wasn¡¯t wearing his shoes, but didn¡¯t feel the cold as he sprinted for the nearest guard building. He reached it and pounded on the door, shouting that they needed a doctor. His attitude was so loud and aggressive that it came as no surprise when, as the door opened, the guard who appeared kicked Carrick to the ground and pointed a gun at him while shouting at him to stay down. Carrick put his hands behind his head and forced his voice as level as he could. ¡°Apple, sir, he''s having a seizure or something. We need a medic in Green group.¡± The guard stared at Carrick for a moment. It only then occurred to Carrick that this had probably been used as a ploy to get careless guards to rush into an ambush in the past, so he wasn''t surprised when the guard disappeared for a few moments and then reappeared holding a larger gun. ¡°Stand up,¡± he ordered. ¡°Hands behind your head. Turn your back to me.¡± Carrick stood and, frustrated, obeyed. ¡°He''s going to die!¡± he shouted. That earned him a kick in the small of his back, which threw Carrick back down to the ground. Though he tried to throw his hands out to break his fall, he still got a gash across his cheek. ¡°Shut up. Get back up. As you were before.¡± So Carrick stood, shuffling from one foot to the other as the frozen ground burned his bare skin. It wasn¡¯t until a minute later that a speeder approached with two armed guards and one unarmed man with a medic¡¯s vest thrown over his uniform. ¡°Go on,¡± said the first guard. Carrick knew he couldn''t run without earning a bullet in the back. Instead, he walked as quickly as he could, cursing the guards for their slowness. They finally reached the barracks of the Green group. The door hung open, and a prisoner who stood by the door put his hands up as the convoy approach. ¡°Doctor¡¯s here,¡± he said it out loud, slow, clear voice. ¡°Bring him out.¡± It was clear the prisoners were also doing what they could to keep this from appearing at all like an ambush or uprising. They had already dragged a table from another barrack, and now two of the largest prisoners carried the unmoving form of Apple between them out the door of the building before laying him on the table. Old Oak followed these men, his face gray and grave. The armed guards walked directly behind the medic, scanning the area all around them. The medic approached the form of Apple on the table. The prisoner¡¯s eyes wide open and orange foam stained his mouth and the front of his yellow jumpsuit. The medic pulled two hand-held tools from a pouch at his waist. He inserted the tip of one of these into Apple¡¯s ear and swiped the other along his body from head to toe. ¡°The nervous system is inhibited,¡± he said. ¡°Heart rate is weak. Brain activity is low. Breaths are shallow. Approaching hypothermia.¡± He turned to Old Oak. ¡°What do you know?¡± He asked. Old Oak granted. ¡°He made a tea with ghostblade roots.¡± A look of anger and disgust crossed the medic¡¯s face. ¡°Junkie,¡± he muttered. Carrick looked between the medic and Old Oak. Ghostblade was the name of the weed which they brewed into tea. But they all drank it. No one else had ever had this reaction to it. It seemed that it was some kind of contraband, though one which guards had never searched the barracks for. They performed contraband searches every few days, but had never taken the supply of tea. Unless the root was a different part of the plant than was otherwise made into tea, and this had been what Apple consumed. Carrick remembered when they¡¯d first met. Apple had told Carrick that he was in the Wasteland because he¡¯d smuggled narcotics. Carrick''s heart sank. The medic pulled a hypodermic from his bag, attached a vial to it, and jabbed it directly into Apple''s heart. The roundish man convulsed again, and Carrick shouted, though a nearby prisoner held him back and muttered at him to not be an idiot. Apple coughed up more orange foam and then was still again. The medic pulled a patch from his bag, ripped off the back, and slapped it onto the side of Apple¡¯s neck. He nodded to the guards, who roughly took Apple up and deposited him into the back of the speeder before throwing a couple heavy blankets over him. They took Apple away, and that was the last Carrick ever saw of him. C9 - Ghostblade Prisoner 3128, James Malik, alias Apple, was unable to be saved by the medics of the Wasteland. Almost three times the lethal dose of a certain neurotoxin was found in his body, a substance which occurred alongside a mild opioid which was likewise found in the root of the plant called ghostblade which grew upon the plains of the Wasteland and was made into a tea by desperate prisoners. No one volunteered this news to the prisoners. Old Oak was required to ask one of the highest-ranking guards directly. He was the only prisoner who had enough standing to demand such a thing. Carrick didn¡¯t know if that was the first time Apple had ever drunk such a tea, or whether the poison had built up in his body over time, or whether he might have even intended to overdose on the opioid itself and simply hadn''t realized the presence of the neurotoxin. It wasn''t as though they had a chemical lab situated somewhere in the Green group¡¯s barracks. Old Oak himself gave Carrick some words of sympathy. They held a small funeral for Apple outside on Monday night, after all had come back from their work. Carrick had gone off on his own that morning in the truck which he had shared with Apple. He¡¯d gone to their work site and angrily ripped apart every box and housing in sight, gathering up countless components whose value he had little way of knowing without Apple¡¯s guidance. The guard on duty to receive scavenge had been furious at Carrick for wasting his time with so much junk. He¡¯d struck Carrick across the face, throwing him to the ground, and then kicked him several times in the ribs. Though Carrick had provided some objects of value, the guard had considered it all a loss because of the annoyance of disposing of the worthless items, and had told Carrick he would need to make up the quota on the next day. Old Oak told Carrick the Green group¡¯s stash would cover him. ¡°You owe nothing except loyalty,¡± he said. ¡°Just cover someone else when you can. As Apple did for you. He was a good man. Always cheerful, never complaining. A hard worker.¡± Old Oak shrugged his bony shoulders. Carrick wondered, not for the first time, how much work the old man could even perform every day. Old Oak went out the same as everyone else, but he never seemed to be sweaty or weary when he returned with his partner, a selection which rotated out every day. Carrick at this point assumed working with Old Oak was a great honor, though one which probably resulted in the partner doing all the work while Old Oak Sat by the wayside. He wondered what the old man had done, once upon a time, to earn such a place of respect and command among the prisoners. He did not ask, of course. ¡°Thank you,¡± he said instead. ¡°You know, Apple never mentioned to me that he was taking the root. I never saw him do it. I can''t believe I missed it happening.¡± ¡°I imagine he mostly chewed it in his bunk,¡± said Old Oak. ¡°Though he certainly made a tea of it the night he died. I understand steeping it takes away much of the bitterness. But he likely didn''t want to risk anyone seeing it any other time. He''s not the first person to die of it, though that usually happens deep underground. We usually see a pattern of behavior beforehand where they do no work for two or three days before they die. ¡°That the root exists in such a terrible capacity is something we keep hidden for obvious reasons. When a man discovers it, he thinks he''s the first person to do so, and even in Green group does not share this discovery with others. The root provides a lovely sensation, boy, one that makes you feel like you''re floating and like your hands and feet are warm even on the coldest nights. But, as you''ve seen, the death is not pleasant. I don''t think the pleasure makes up for the end.¡±Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. Old Oak was standing close to Carrick and speaking to him in a quiet voice. Other men sat around a nearby fire which was much bigger than any of the smaller fires had been. They seem to have used about three times as much fuel as they had for the smaller fires. The men passed back and forth a flask of brandy which Old Oak had produced from somewhere, the first alcohol which Carrick had seen in the Wasteland. Old Oak was speaking, that is, so low that only Carrick could hear. ¡°I''m surprised,¡± said Carrick, ¡°that someone like Apple who used to smuggle the stuff didn''t have a way of removing the poison.¡± ¡°He likely knew nothing of it,¡± said Old Oak, and sighed. ¡°I''ve thought many times about warning people about it. It''s always seemed to me a thing I should never mention, so that the men don¡¯t hear my warning and think to try it anyway. Even among those prisoners who know its true nature, which is fewer than half, due to the frequency with which our poor brothers die and are replaced, I have commanded no one speak of it. ¡°A little booze now and then is one thing, but it does no man any good to dull his whole body with morphine when he needs to work hard to provide for his brothers.¡± The old man shook his head. ¡°Stay away from it, boy. If I discover you¡¯ve found some way of isolating the drug and giving it to others, I will kill you with my bare hands. I know where you come from. I know what your Family does on the outside. This life is a new life, and I do not judge you for what you''ve done before it, but you will do it no longer here.¡± Indignation flared in Carrick¡¯s chest for a moment, but then he nodded. ¡°I know the Family¡¯s reputation,¡± he said. ¡°I don¡¯t expect you to believe me, but I find all those things as vile as you do. You''ll not have any of that trouble with me.¡± Old Oak did not look as though he believed Carrick. ¡°See that it doesn''t,¡± he said, and returned to the edge of the fire to drink the last of the brandy. Carrick left the ring of men on boxes and buckets. He was overcome by the sensation that he was an outsider, a sensation he had begun to shake in his friendship with Apple and Bigfoot and the other men of his barrack, but which he could not escape in this moment. He left the warmth of the fire where he was only barely welcome and walked out to the edge of the Wasteland. He walked through the asphalt lot of the crawlers, past the truck which Apple would never sit in again, past the great ramp which led into the labyrinthine intestines of the facility below, the graveyard of thousands of scientists and engineers who had died trying to help humanity escape Dirt. There were no guards here. Nothing stopped Carrick from stepping onto the snow of the Wasteland proper, the frost crunching under his increasingly worn loafers. As he walked, Carrick realized that what he had previously mistaken for the sheen of moonlight upon the wasteland¡¯s ground was indeed a glowing spread of grass-like leaves. He walked until the shimmering blades surrounded him. Each was shaped like a sword, and only a few inches tall. He squatted down and with the numb fingers pulled up a clump of ghostblade. The leaves snapped off from roots frozen into the ground, and Carrick saw in the dim light of the sky and the ground that a dark, blood-colored sap welled up from the root despite the frozen temperatures. The blades retained their glow for a few moments as Carrick held them, though that light quickly faded. Carrick chewed one blade, the bitter and astringent taste he recognized from the tea mitigated by a new and lemony freshness. He remained there and simply stared at the glowing blades around him. They begin to pulse, as though speaking to Carrick directly. He could not understand them. He was overcome with the alien sensation that despite this, they could see exactly into the center of his being, that they laughed at him, for they belonged here, and he did not. C10 - The Fall of the Blue Shrike Lieutenant Angers orbited the colony world as he scanned for the location of the planet¡¯s terraformer. Its signal signal pulsed weakly. In hyperspace, a signal could be received from much further away, though it carried different information than it did in localspace. Unintuitively, it was actually harder for Angers to locate the same while in the planet''s orbit than it had been while the Blue Shrike lay hundreds of thousands of miles away in hyperspace. Finally, his computer locked onto the signal. It seemed a portion of the planet¡¯s atmosphere had been disrupted within the last century by a terraforming event which did not follow ordinary terraforming conventions. Whether the device had malfunctioned or had been tampered with by unqualified engineers, it seemed that more of its energy had dissipated than Angers had initially assumed by the strength of the signal. He wondered about what this event had done to the surface of the planet. It worried him. A malfunctioning terraformer could do more than simply punch a hole in an atmosphere. It had the power to transform the inhabitants of a planet on a cellular level, reprogramming their DNA into something stable but aberrant. It could warp every molecule of a particular element on a planet into a completely different one, rendering that world inhospitable toward life of any kind. But the computer registered electrical activity and transmission signals coming from all over the planet, so human civilization had maintained itself. That was good. Angers wondered if he should head toward the most populated part of the planet and hope he could convince whatever engineers he could find to assist him, but Angers had no reason to believe the inhabitants of this planet would be any less selfish or curious than those of any other world. He had nothing to offer them except the technology of his ship, if they hadn''t already discovered space travel on their own, an accomplishment which he doubted considering the level of technological activity his scanners picked up across the rest of the planet. No, not exactly the rest of the planet. The technology came from only one continent. In fact, the other continents were completely barren. Angers frowned. The colonists had never left their home continent? That was inconceivable. Humans of every world carried an inborn voyaging instinct. People were fundamentally driven to move beyond the borders of their homes and to explore and conquer every bit of land so they could find. It was this drive which eventually led human civilizations to the stars hundreds of times in the past and, surely, millions times more to come.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Perhaps this failure to colonize resulted from the terraformer¡¯s malfunction. Well, if it still worked at all, which seemed likely to Angers due to its still-pulsing signal, Angers could use its technology to repair his ship and to transmute localspace fuel, if not more nuclear power supplies for his hyperdrive. He tried not to think too hard about the virus still lurking within his ship''s computer. It could be the worst thing possible for an Ideologue Virus to come into contact with a terraformer. He would worry about that once he landed on the planet. If he made it. The lieutenant dropped his starfighter into an orbital descent vector, hurtling directly toward the signal. His localspace fuel was almost completely depleted, and he used up over three-quarters of what remained to break out of orbit. Angers hurtled through the broken atmosphere, speeding toward what his computer quickly revealed to be ice. He frantically ordered a surface scan and determined that the terraformer was buried deep under fragile ice which appeared on the surface to be solid ground. A small human settlement lay nearby, but their technology did not seem to be advanced, their communication channels operating by simple radio waves. But under the ground, there was advanced technology indeed. Technology of a higher degree than Angers had detected anywhere on the surface of the planet. As he sped on a collision course with the world itself, Angers formed a picture in his mind. The humans of this world had once been more advanced. They would have initially been provided with their terraformer. None would have known how to operate in any other manner than as a black box, engaging with the controls to perform only basic tasks, though they carried with them an engine capable of destroying and creating life on a scale which would render them gods to humans of pre-technological culture. At some point, these humans would, having curiosity, if they could figure out how to create the proper tools for it, disassemble their terraformer and perhaps try to reverse-engineer the components within, the components which Euclidian science could not even begin to decipher. These humans would have believed they¡¯d discovered the secret of how the terraformer worked, only to be proved wrong as they obliterated themselves and a portion of their atmosphere in a moment of false triumph. With all the brightest minds of their generation lost, the rest of humanity would have progressed slowly and strangely, stagnating or perhaps even regressing from generation to generation. This idea disheartened Angers. He doubted there were any minds left on this world capable of helping him. Well, then he would just have to help himself. The Blue Shrike had long since reached terminal velocity. Angers pointed the nose of his starfighter at the weakest portion of the ice, which rose like a sheet of lightning to meet him. Rather than using the last bit of his fuel to thrust away from the earth to slow his descent, Angers diverted all power to his forward-facing shields, then shoved a thick guard into his mouth, clamped himself into his seat, and braced for impact. A bright flash burst through his head as, even dampened by the shields, the impact slammed every cell in Anger¡¯s body with titanic force. Lieutenant Angers lost consciousness just as a thundering boom rolled across the Wasteland and his starfighter disappeared into the ice. C11 - Hazardous to Government Property Carrick snapped up in bed, staring in puzzlement at the dim LED on the wall opposite his bunk. What had woken him? His first impulse was that it had been some nightmare he couldn¡¯t remember, but other men also sat up around him, similarly puzzled looks on their faces. ¡°Must have been an earthquake,¡± Bigfoot muttered, and lay back down. Maybe it was simply that. At any rate, no more sounds broke the night. The ground shook no further. No sirens burst through the silence of the few hours of sleep the prisoners were afforded. Troubled, Carrick slipped back into sleep. *** The next morning, Carrick made his way to the truck which he continued to drive by himself. A message waited for him on the truck''s display panel, one which he assumed had been likewise sent to each other vehicle in the fleet. Last night, a power bank or something similar exploded. It wasn''t near any active work site, so pay it no mind. Within twenty-four hours, we will pinpoint its exact location and issue a hazard warning. The explosion will have destroyed any items of value and will have created an environment hazardous to government property, so do not seek it out. Carrick tapped the dashboard as he waited for the cab to heat. A power bank had exploded? He looked through the viewscreen, past the long line of trucks making their way down the ramp into the heart of the facility. He stared beyond the strands of ghostblade which glowed faintly in what was, so early in the morning, still the moonlit night. He thought he could see a plume of steam or smoke faintly rising on the horizon. It whispered up and dissolved softly against the corona of the moon above. Carrick was immediately distrustful of the official transmission. He was in the habit of mistrusting anything that came directly from the mouth of a government agent. Perhaps this whole event related to the reason additional bases of operation had never been constructed deeper into the Wasteland. Perhaps the government had already set up a base far under the facility and had already begun experimentation in the same manner as the Accident. Maybe the event last night had been a smaller Accident, and the government wanted to keep prying prisoners from seeing something secret enough that would require their execution and the loss of their labor. Carrick withdrew from his parking space, joining the caravan of trucks. He opened a blank console on the truck''s dashboard and began punching in mathematical functions, estimating the distance and direction of the plume of smoke. Carrick plugged the resulting coordinates into the truck¡¯s wayfinder and compared to them to the existing tunnel map. The coordinates lay about three hundred miles to the north, and someone''s old, abandoned work site came very close to it. If Carrick followed this path, he''d be required to dig for about half a mile to reach the estimated center of the explosion, assuming that none of the work site had collapsed from the event. The prisoners were not curious people. Carrick had realized that after his first work day''s conversation with Apple. From his personal experiences with the guards, Carrick couldn''t blame them. He himself had been beaten for bringing back too much scavenge that was not worth anything. When you combined the lack of expertise with such punishment, you created a person who had tunnel vision for a very specific goal and asked few questions whose domains lay outside that goal. There was an alternative scenario, Carrick decided, to the one which he had initially considered. Perhaps the government didn''t want all the prisoners bee-lining for the scene of the event. It could be that something like a meteorite had fallen, or that there had been a minor volcanic eruption that might bubble up rich veins of elements not usually found in other places. Perhaps the government was waiting to find the most trustworthy and reliable technicians to send on a special expedition rather than letting everyone have at it. Were this the case, perhaps Carrick could earn a place as a reliable technician if he showed the initiative of excavating and returning whatever was possible. Carrick knew he had a better mental index for the values of elements such as precious metals than any other prisoner did. Among the murderers and thieves and rapists, Carrick was certain he was the only one who had experience telling fake jewels from real ones and worthless alloys from ingots of platinum. And maybe the guards would simply shoot Carrick in the head for taking this upon himself. With every day that passed, Carrick was finding the simple state of being alive less intrinsically appealing. He was aware of how malnutrition worked. He knew that his body was devouring his own muscles for nutrients with every passing moment. It would not be long before Carrick looked as nearly skeletal as everyone else. There was a chance Carrick could improve his life by seeking the site of this event. It seemed to him at that moment his only hope of escaping a life of torturous misery and watching everyone else die around him. *** Carrick drove for nearly five hours. Almost none of the travel was along a pre-established railway, but almost entirely along passages which had been dug by prisoners who came before him. Though Carrick had known no one would likely attempt what he did, the utter isolation of his path was eerie.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. He drove toward an abandoned worksite, a journey which took him very early on from the paths of any other truck. Even during the last few days when Carrick had driven alone, much of his journey had been with other trucks in fairly close proximity, close enough that he could see their taillights in the darkness before him before they eventually veered off to their own work sites. But not today. Today, Carrick drove alone down a road which had not seen a human intruder in who knew how long. Carrick glanced constantly at the wayfinder, ensuring that he did not take a single wrong turn. The tunnels he followed after the first hours were narrow, not having even enough room for him to turn the truck around. These were the paths of individuals. He had long since diverged from stems that carried carried crowds of people to different sites. Apple had not had time to teach Carrick all the ins and outs of the crawler truck. There were nearly a dozen instruments on board which Carrick was completely unfamiliar with. He had long since graduated from being merely a driver for the family, and even those vehicles he drove when he was a young boy were not complex tools. They were sedans with little more than navigational and entertainment systems, not construction and excavation vehicles like the crawler trucks. There was a rudimentary documentation system on board which read out difficult to understand instructions in a monotone voice to Carrick as he drove. He had to shut these off after about an hour, for the voice was so steady and expressionless that he felt he would fall asleep if he listened to one more minute of it. But during that time, he learned how to engage the excavator on the front of the truck, providing the appropriate tool was attached to the front of the truck. He likewise learned how to engage the short-range scanner, and, immediately upon learning this, flipped it on. Carrick¡¯s viewscreen lit up with projections which showed cracks and pockets in the surrounding stone, each one filled with red shading to denote nothing of value lay within. Carrick kept this scanner active for the rest of his drive, grateful for the additional visual stimulus it provided. Eventually, Carrick slowed the truck to a little faster than walking speed. He was approaching the coordinates he had marked, and as yet had seen nothing like the cave-in he had anticipated. He keyed for a medium-range scan, one which reached up to a half mile out, and read through the visual documentation presented alongside the program. It was much more complicated than the short-range scanner, and required him to scan for individual sets of data at a time rather than simply collecting everything and projecting it as the short-range scanner did. after a few attempts to find the right syntax for programming the scan, Carrick successfully scanned for recent collapses. The scan returned nothing. He tried to find an option to scan for nearby recent seismic activity, but this seemed to be beyond the scanner¡¯s capabilities. Finally, returning to his earlier theory that the event might have instead been a meteor or volcano, he performed a thermal scan. This time, he had a hit. Excited, Carrick leaned over the dashboard and stared at the pulsating dot which had been added to his wayfinder. The temperature was not exactly as hot as molten rock, but it was significantly hotter than either the cool stone around it or the ice above. About a quarter mile to the northwest lay Carrick''s destination. He stopped the truck and opened his cab door, grateful there was at least enough clearance in the tunnel for him to do this, and walked around the truck until he reached the tools. Carrick pulled open the tool bay door and rummaged around until he found the wheel-like device, which had magnetic brackets on its backside to attach to the front of the truck. It was tremendously heavy, but Carrick managed to drag it back around and heave it up until it fell with a clang into place on the front of the truck. He heaved against the lever which locked it in, and a safety light on its front turned brilliant green. Carrick climbed back into the truck, slammed his door shut, and engaged excavation mode. The truck settled itself onto the ground and projected hydraulic pistons to its sides and back to anchor and brace itself against the tunnel. Plasma jets ignited on the front of the truck, and the wheel began to spin. Carrick gently leaned into the truck''s controls, and the antigrav repulsors on its rear pushed it forward and westward, shoving the spinning plasma jets directly into the tunnel wall. The air was filled with a chattering sound like a million skulls, all laughing at him, but Carrick gritted his teeth and pushed the power harder. The wall disintegrated before him, not only the portion directly in contact with the plasma, but stone all around the truck as well. Unlike when he held the plasma pick, much of the vibration was transferred to the truck itself, and Carrick had a hard time keeping his focus as the truck moved forward. The clattering vibration was so intense that Carrick quickly lost sense of time and couldn''t tell how fast he was progressing. He later realized, reading the trucks chronometer, that he had only excavated for fewer than ten minutes before the truck punched through the wall ten feet above the ground of what had once been the Capitol Building of human civilization on the planet Dirt. It took a half-second for Carrick to realize that the vibration had stopped and that he was plunging nose-first toward the ground. He hauled up on the controls and the rear thrusters stopped just as the excavator¡¯s safety function triggered, designed for exactly this scenario. The antigrav tried to compensate, but Carrick was still jarred so hard by his impact with the ground that he bit deeply into his tongue, filling his mouth with blood. A light flashed on the dashboard, warning him that repair would be necessary to the front bumper. For a few moments, Carrick simply spluttered on his own blood and fumbled for the switch to activate the truck''s external lights. Carrick grabbed the can of first aid adhesive from the door at the same moment he flicked on all the lights. Hoping he wouldn''t seal his throat closed, he stuck out his tongue and sprayed into his mouth, shooting pain through his entire head as the flesh of his tongue bubbled and the wound healed closed. And Carrick saw before him crumbled ruins of seamless marble and gleaming black metal. He saw a metal cube ten by ten feet hovering in the air, a faint green light emanating from each of its faces despite no visible LEDs or bioluminescent elements. And he saw what appeared to be a sleek fighter jet buried half into the ground, surrounded by tremendous chunks of ice, illuminated from above by watery sunlight which filtered through a plume of steam or smoke that rose from the still-glowing jet on its tail. C12 - Alien Invader Carrick stumbled out of the cab, twisting his ankle as he hit the ground. He barely took in his surroundings, fixated as he was on the craft that had crashed before him. ¡°Hey!¡± he shouted. ¡°Hey, help is here! You''re going to be okay!¡± He reached the craft. Miraculously, though it was buried in shattered stone halfway up to the fuselage, not even the paint seemed to be harmed. The craft was not very large, certainly no bigger than a two-seater fighter jet. Yet as he stood mere feet away from it, taking in deep breaths of air that stunk of ozone, it struck Carrick that he had never exactly seen a craft like this before. The iridescent blue of its body was nothing out of the ordinary, but he couldn¡¯t recognize the letters scroll upon its side, and the engine on the back was like nothing he had ever seen. It wasn''t a meteor or a volcano after all. Surely the government had been performing experiments, just as the old facility had, to create a craft that could leave the planet and venture into space. Unsuccessfully, it seemed. At least, it had failed to make a successful landing. Carrick stepped closer, looking with hesitation into the hole created by the falling craft. Below, he could see what could be nothing other than the canopy of a cockpit. Using the crumbled stone of the hole¡¯s wall to steady himself, Carrick slid carefully down the submerged wing of the craft, coming eventually alongside the canopy. A dim, intermittent flickering came from within the dark glass. Carrick used the sleeve of his jumpsuit to wipe away grime and dust from the canopy, but revealed little more of the interior. Carrick unhooked a portable LED from his belt, switched it on, and held it up to the glass. It revealed the interior of the cockpit to be filled with dark and heavy vapor. Carrick at first thought it must be smoke, but then he saw a figure within it move slightly.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! The figure had been leaning over the silhouette of a dashboard, as though it had crashed and died against it, but as Carrick¡¯s light shone through, the figure raised its head just slightly. Through the vapor, Carrick couldn''t tell if it was looking at him or not. ¡°Hold on!¡± Carrick shouted again. ¡°I''ll be right back!¡± He clambered his way back up of the wing of the craft and dashed back to the truck, ignoring the pain in his leg from where he had twisted it. He climbed back into the truck and drove it to the falling craft so that its nose was close to the craft''s tail. Carrick exited, removed the excavation attachment from the front of the truck, and exchanged it for a tow winch. Praying that this wouldn''t simply rip the engine free, he got close enough that he could toss the tow hook up against the simple exhaust grating on the engine''s housing until it hooked through and caught. Carrick re-entered the truck, set it in tow mode, and set the entire power of the truck to work as it anchored itself to the ground with pistons and then began hauling the much-larger craft out from its point of impact. The winch creaked as Carrick put it under tremendous strain, and a warning flashed on the truck''s dashboard, informing him that the winch mechanism was burning itself out and should be shut off immediately. Carrick ignored it and gritted his teeth as the craft peaked slowly from its nest. Regardless of whatever reason it had remained intact upon its impact, the broken and protruding stones did indeed scratch and scrape the paint of its blue body as the craft retracted. Finally, the main body of the craft boomed onto the ground of the chamber, though a good half of the cockpit and nose still hung over the edge of the pit. Carrick powered down the truck''s engine, ignoring the smoke pouring from the winch mechanism, and paused only to retrieve a plasma pick and first-aid box before dashing beside the craft. He powered on the pick and tried to cut open the canopy. In moments, the canopy burst open of its own accord with a hiss, and Carrick discovered with a start that he had caused no damage to the craft itself. Vapor burst from the cockpit and washed over Carrick. It felt cool and almost calming. It carried a pleasant scent and made Carrick woozy. Maybe that was only the excitement of the moment. Within seconds, the figure inside the cockpit rose, towering from its vantage several feet above Carrick. It wore a helmet like a gas mask, and was covered by something that was unmistakably a black flight suit with dull green metallic elements. The figure slowly raised its hands to its collar and disengaged a lock, which then allowed it to remove the mask from its face. To Carrick¡¯s shock, he stared into the face of a creature who was certainly not human. C13 - First Contact An alarm beeped in Lieutenant Angers¡¯ ear. He shook himself awake. Life-support¡¯s last-ditch effort, a profusion of biotic fog, filled his cockpit. A muffled and unfamiliar voice came to him from beyond the canopy glass, but he could not make out the words. Angers could hardly move. Life-support had injected a drug directly into his spine, which suppressed his biological processes to maximize the time available for a rescue crew to find him. It was extremely difficult for him to shake off these effects and regain control of his own body. A bright light appeared on the edge of the viewscreen. The screen was in fact a holographic projection inside his helmet which gave him a view of the canopy superimposed under normal circumstances with computer-generated renders. Angers squinted against the external light source, but was grateful for the stimulus which helped push the effects of the drug out of his system. He tried to raise his hand to wave at the light. If he put his hand between the source outside the canopy and his face, the viewscreen within his helmet would likewise adjust, but he couldn''t quite muster the strength yet. Raising his head was all Angers could do. The voice outside chattered something again. It was clearly the voice of a human, not an alien. That was good. It reminded Angers where he was on the small colony world. A sudden burst of terror filled his mind as he realized that, because of the life-support system, he might have sat here for months before his organs shut down if he had fallen into a place where no one could reach him. He had crashed, he remembered, into a place under the ground. He¡¯d pierced the ice above to reach as close to the colony world¡¯s terraformer as possible. Well, someone had found him. Maybe it had been as much as a month, or even more. Angers¡¯ body was filled with pain, but he didn''t know whether that resulted from the trauma he had suffered upon entry or of the slow decay of his organs over time spent in emergency stasis. He slowly regained the use of his fingers and hands. Angers half-consciously tried to key for a vitals scan, but the computer refused to draw enough power to perform this task. The Blue Shrike was running on emergency reserves, and those reserves were dedicated toward the basic act of keeping him alive, nothing more. Angers heard the noise of an electrical engine, a hum a little louder than a quiet prayer, though it echoed gently against the walls of wherever he lay. Suddenly, the Blue Shrike jolted. Angers quickly realized he was being pulled upward out of somewhere. He was surely being retrieved from whatever hole he had dug himself into. There was a slam, and Angers impacted his dashboard again. He heard a vehicle door opening and slamming shut, and then scurrying, and then the activation of some kind of concussive power tool. Angers didn¡¯t think whatever tools these colonists had could damage the Blue Shrike, but he couldn''t take that chance. He frantically hit the emergency evacuation button and his cockpit burst open, allowing the biotic vapor to escape. Angers rose on legs shaky from disuse, grateful that his muscles didn¡¯t seem to have degenerated during however long he was asleep. He saw through his helmet a malnourished creature of undoubtedly human descent standing before him, slack-jawed, holding a tool in his hands. There was a box next to the colonist which Angers assumed was a first aid kit, and the colonist wore some kind of yellow jumpsuit which hung loosely off his body, clearly not tailored to his form. Angers raised a hand to his throat and released his mask, pulling it with what felt like disgusting suction from the clammy flesh of his neck and head. Frigid air burned Angers¡¯ neck, but he breathed in deeply of the fresh air, pure and infinitely more life-giving them the recycled atmosphere of the Blue Shrike. The colonist¡¯s features were heavier than Angers¡¯ own, and its flesh was much pinker. He was a descendant of ancient human stock, clearly lacking the elegant bone structure the bluish-skinned strains of humanity had adapted over the last millennium. Angers had never seen a strain of human quite like this colonist¡¯s in person, though he had read about them in his is xenology and anthropology training. The colonist began speaking again, his tone full of disbelief and wonder. The dialect was so far removed from orthodox Paraea that Angers couldn¡¯t even begin to interpret it, so he replaced his helmet and used its dedicated processor to run a bilateral translation. Within moments, the colonist¡¯s words warped in Angers¡¯ ears, and he began to understand the translation into Paraea. Not that the words themselves made much sense. The colonist was babbling to himself, not at all to Angers. He was talking about doom and death, or about narrowly avoiding it, and something about an accident. ¡°Hey,¡± said Angers. He knew his words would be translated into the colonist¡¯s own language through the speakers on either side of his helmet, though he knew likewise the sound would seem inhuman and distorted. This would unfortunately render Angers even more alien than the colonist would certainly already perceive him. ¡°My name is Lieutenant Angers of the Paraceum,¡± he said. ¡°I''m a human, just like you. I don''t know what you know of your planet''s history, but settlers colonized you from a greater human civilization many years ago. You descend from those settlers, and I descend from the humans who stayed behind. I''m not an alien, even if I look different to you. I''m on an important mission and need whatever help your people can give me. I''m hurt and out of fuel. Do you understand?¡±You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The colonist slowly sat on the ground. ¡°A generation ago,¡± he said slowly, ¡°our scientists¡­ they tried to leave the planet. They failed, and there was an explosion that¡­ that killed thousands of people. It turned this whole place above us to ice.¡± He made a vague gesture above his head. ¡°All those people died for nothing. We came from the stars to begin with? How did we lose that?¡± Angers threw a line over the side of the cockpit and, with great difficulty, slid down. He approached the colonist. Angers stood a head''s height over him, and Angers was short for a human. He wondered just how different his physiology was to the humans of this world. He extended his hand in what he knew was a nearly universal human gesture of greeting. The colonist took Angers¡¯ hand hesitantly and shook it. ¡°My name is Carrick,¡± he said. ¡°I¡­ I¡­¡± He seemed very uncertain of himself. ¡°I¡¯m a convicted prisoner,¡± he finally blurted out. ¡°The Accident I mentioned left a gigantic facility that sunk under the ground. It was filled with technology that''s far more advanced than what we have nowadays. The government set up a prison on the edge of the Wasteland and sends prisoners into it to retrieve technology for them.¡± He shrugged. ¡°Last night you crashed. They told us prisoners it was just a power system blowing up somewhere. We were told to ignore the event because it could be dangerous to our equipment. I knew they weren¡¯t telling us the whole story, so I investigated.¡± The colonist, Carrick, scratched his head. ¡°I suppose they¡¯re assembling a task force to look for themselves, one with much better equipment than they gave me.¡± Yet Carrick had been the one to find Angers. Had he not, had his life-support system continued to suppress his consciousness until the government of this world found him, Angers might have woke under the vivisecting scalpels of unscrupulous surgeons while his precious Blue Shrike was ripped apart for components that would make no sense to the scientists of this world. ¡°I think,¡± said Angers, ¡°I owe you my life.¡± Carrick seems to come to that same realization. ¡°What now?¡± He asked. ¡°I know something of bureaucracy, enough to know it will probably be two days before they get clearance to commandeer the staff and equipment they¡¯ll use to get out here.¡± Angers stepped back and took stock of his surroundings. He stood in a vast chamber a hundred yards both long and wide. He was surrounded by the crumbled ruins of buildings that could only have been terraformed, for they were seamless things of marble that melted into granite below. From cracks in the stone below sprouted tufts of gently wafting, glowing grass. It wafted, in fact, in a breeze that he couldn¡¯t feel at all on his skin. The air down here was almost entirely still. Beside Angers, or rather, beside the Blue Shrike, huge shards of ice and soil and carpets of that glowing grass loomed in piles, the debris from when Angers had punched through the ground above. And there, in the center of the chamber, hovering twenty feet off the ground and eighty feet below the roof of the cavern, was a terraformer. Angers stared at it in wonder. He had not seen many of the devices in his lifetime. Only, in fact, when he had visited old colony worlds during the early years of his career. Terraformers were objects of living and intelligent metal, four-dimensional organs capable of transmuting end reimagining matter in a way only the children of the Paraceum could. They were the physical fruit of intelligence incarnate. They were technology that could no longer be produced, for the Paraceum no longer allowed humans to interface with anything that resembled it. The terraformer was an echo of a bygone age, an age when humans were masters over their own machinery, were sorcerers of space and time, were alchemists of the stuff that had given birth to the stars. This terraformer was weak, nearly dead. Any one of the space-faring strain of humanity could feel its resonance from this proximity. The pressure inside his head, Angers now realized, had been a part of why he had felt so dull upon waking. Now, looking at it as it gently shivered in midair in a way nearly imperceptible to the eye, Angers felt that resonance in even his own heartbeat. Angers pointed to the terraformer. ¡°Your scientists were experimenting upon that,¡± he said. ¡°When your ancestors came to this world, it was more than likely inhospitable toward human life. Terraformers are programmed to change a planet of an appropriate size to one very similar to our common ancestors¡¯ home world, into a planet where humans can thrive.¡± Carrick looked at the terraformer as though seeing it for the first time. Surely he hadn''t failed to notice it when he¡¯d first entered the chamber. ¡°That''s the cause of all of this,¡± he whispered. ¡°If it can transform a planet into something livable, it can also transform it into something deadly.¡± Angers nodded. ¡°The terraformer isn¡¯t a simple machine that can be comprehended by ordinary physicists and engineers,¡± he said. ¡°It''s like a human. It has a soul. It can feel pain. It can feel love. If your scientists experimented upon it, they were torturing it, and it had no way of telling them this. Eventually, its mind must have broken, and it couldn¡¯t help itself from obliterating and transforming the surrounding land, the only way it knows how to communicate.¡± He turned back to Carrick, well aware that he must appear an alien, bug-like monster with the artificial voice coming from his mask and the impenetrable black eyes gleaming in the soft glow of the terraformer above. ¡°It¡¯s a miracle,¡± said Angers, ¡°that it could restrain itself and not annihilate your entire planet.¡± This was way too much, clearly. Carrick couldn¡¯t process it. It was clear by his face. Carrick toyed with the tool in his hands, turning it around between his fingers. He idly flicked a switch on its side on and off, watching a plasma jet appear and disappear at its tip. ¡°And my government wants to get their hands on it again,¡± he said. ¡°They''ll do the same thing all over again. It won''t be possible to escape another Accident, will it?¡± ¡°No,¡± said Angers. ¡°The bare minimum is that the same thing will happen. I¡¯d bank on it, though, that this time the entire planet will be destroyed. Or, rather, transformed into something different. It''s a strange thing with terraformers and technology like them. When they get weak, close to death, as this one is, their potency and power don''t reduce or diminish. Only their controllability. They draw from a power source so vast it''s unimaginable, one that makes a sun look like a candle.¡± ¡°Then what are we going to do?¡± Carrick asked. He wasn''t really asking Angers. His tone was one of quiet and personal horror. ¡°We use it to repair my ship,¡± said Angers. ¡°Then we perform one more task, one which may or may not be impossible. I need to tell you about the idealogue virus, and how we''re going to encapsulate it.¡± C14 - Debts to Pay Carrick drove back that evening with nothing to show for his day. His nerves hummed with anxiety, excitement, terror, and wonder. Was he dreaming? Had he been beaten so severely by guards that he was in a coma imagining a more exciting world than the one he had always known? Today he had met an alien, or a human from another planet. Was there really a difference between the two? During their discussion, the man who claimed to be Lieutenant Angers had likewise claimed inhuman aliens existed, and were nothing at all like humans, in fact. They had talked for nearly an hour in the chamber which Angers said it was likely the capitol building of the original human civilization under the Wasteland. He¡¯d said he didn''t know how or why humans had abandoned their initial landing point, but that a colony ship had dropped them off with only the terraforming device and a few vehicles for technology. Angers had talked about the many incredible and nearly unbelievable functions of the terraformer. He claimed it could convert any element to any other element, literally changing lead to gold has in a story Carrick heard when he was a child. Angers had smiled when he heard this, saying it was a story that had been passed down from generation to generation of humans, a bit of shared history between their races. Carrick had been required to excavate a slope up back to his tunnel before returning home. He simply had no time to do any work and had not even come close to filling his quota. Worse, he had damaged government property, had both crushed the truck¡¯s bumper truck and burned out the winch he¡¯d used to drag up Angers¡¯ ship, which was apparently called the Blue Shrike. We¡¯ll skip the unimportant details. Carrick was beaten heavily by the Wasteland guards upon his return. He claimed that he stupidly tried to excavate a naturally occurring pocket in the rock which his computer had told him was full of nothing useful. Carrick tried to show on a bitter and arrogant attitude, as though he didn¡¯t trust computers, only his gut instinct. He claimed he¡¯d been required to use the winch to drag himself up out of a small canyon, his fall into which had damaged the bumper. Carrick made a big show of how Apple hadn''t had the time to teach him how to use the truck before dying, that he didn''t discover how to use the excavation function until after the damage had already occurred. It didn''t appear the question of whether the guards believed Carrick mattered. They didn¡¯t accuse him of being a liar, didn¡¯t offer him sympathy, did nothing except put in a work order for the truck and yell at Carrick to work with another prisoner and learn how to use a truck before he tried to drive himself again. Carrick walked away with a broken nose, a cracked rib, and bruises all over his body. When he returned to the Green group¡¯s barracks, Old Oak called Carrick to sit with him alone by the fire for a moment. Carrick had worked for the Family long enough to know that when you did something stupid, you didn¡¯t begin your meeting with the Boss by making excuses or defending yourself. He stood until Old Oak commanded him to sit, and then simply stared at the fire with his hands clasped, trying to ignore the stabbing pain of his injuries. Carrick had already set his nose as best as he could and had packed ice against his face to reduce the swelling. It really didn¡¯t help that much.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Old Oak sighed. ¡°Carrick, this had better not be the beginning of a pattern of self-destructive behavior. Sure, you''re torn up about Apple, but he will not be the last person who dies around here. You only knew him for a few days. You can''t let yourself get so that you don''t care about being alive anymore. He lost people on the outside too, right? It''s no different here. This is your new life, Carrick. You have a responsibility to do what you can with it.¡± Carrick nodded. ¡°Yes sir,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯m not trying to be reckless, sir. I was too arrogant, that''s all. I thought I knew better than an old piece of junk.¡± ¡°I don''t really believe that,¡± said Old Oak. ¡°Carrick, you''re smart. You''re the smartest kid I''ve ever seen here. You know how to read a manual. What, were you trying to escape? Trying to dig some kind of tunnel that would get you out?¡± He tossed a bit of scrap wood into the fire. ¡°Carrick, I don''t know if Apple ever bothered to tell you, but do you know why we have such lax security? Do you know why we¡¯re allowed access to these dangerous tools that could be easily used as weapons against the guards or to break free of the gate?¡± ¡°No sir,¡± said Carrick. ¡°We''re, irradiated boy.¡± Carrick directed his gaze up. Old Oak¡¯s eyes were steely. ¡°There''s a unique signature of radiation that exists below the ground here. It''s concentrated in ghostblade, too. Every time you drink a cup of ghostblade tea, the radiation builds up more in your body. I don''t know if it''s fatal, the way other radiation is. I''m no scientist. I only know what the guards have said, what information is then passed to down to me. ¡°That radiation signal can track you down anywhere on the continent. You''re not the first person to escape. Or to try, rather. Getting out is easy. It''s not much harder than walking up the front gate. There are no land mines, as you might have heard on the outside. You could drive a truck away and they wouldn''t bother sending vehicles after you. Instead, as soon as you got close to a city, the nearest cop would receive a blip on his computer that would inform him there was an escaped prisoner nearby, and he''d simply walk around until the beeping got louder and he found you, no matter what you were wearing, no matter your disguise. ¡°Even a foot of lead wouldn''t be able to save you, as a previous escapee discovered. They just shoot you dead right there. You wouldn''t get any trial. They don''t let prisoners leave, Carrick. You die here and the burn your corpse. All the radiation in your body floats up into the sky, along with your ashes, and that''s the last the world ever sees of you. He waved Carrick away. ¡°Despite how stupid you were today, we''ll cover you again. Three strikes, Carrick. Of course there''ll be other days in the future when you need our help again, but if we have one more day where you do absolutely nothing in the next week, you''re out of Green group. Don''t forget that.¡± ¡°Yes, Mr. Oak.¡± Carrick left slowly and walked into his barrack. It was his turn to cook. He did a poor job of it, and while no one yelled at him, neither was anyone friendly toward him. Carrick went to bed wondering how he was going to perform what he had promised to Lieutenant Angers over the next two days when he had been ordered not to drive on his own, when he could not pass another day without fulfilling his quota. He slept, full of pain, and dreamed of the end of the world. C15 - Cutting Ties and Betraying Allies Lieutenant Angers checked the filament line for the fourth time before securing the line to his belt and climbing up the side of the Blue Shrike. In the short time the colonist Carrick had remained with him, Angers had borrowed several of his tools to combine the Blue Shrike¡¯s sparse repair components into a solar charging balloon. A wafer-thin power cell set in the middle of a lattice of carbon fiber rods, and a delicate solar panel would serve as both the receiving surface and the sail to keep it adrift. The Blue Shrike¡¯s engine still poured out water vapor as a byproduct of the life support system¡¯s function, and Angers heaved the balloon up into this upward-drifting cloud. Angers grinned in triumph as the balloon rose higher and higher, managing to avoid the ceiling and to emerge on the surface. The filament lines scraped against the edges of the hole which the Blue Shrike had created as it fell, but the line was strong and Angers was confident it would not fray. Now he only needed to wait a few hours and see if he could jump start the Blue Shrike¡¯s communications array. Angers tied off the line onto a protruding bolt, then slid down and returned to his cockpit. He looked behind his chair to the small holographic display which was now blank, not receiving any power under emergency conditions. While Angers usually relied on the viewscreen within his helmet to view computer data, the 3D projector display allowed for a higher resolution and for more processing power. It was connected directly to the Blue Shrike itself, rather than powered by its own tiny processor as his helmet was. The ideologue virus lay within the Blue Shrike. Angers had viewed it through that holographic display. Angers knew who had implanted the virus into his computer. It could be no one other than the space pirate Rakka. Angers had captured and imprisoned Rakka and his crew on five different occasions now. The lieutenant had become known in his sector as a kind of expert on the pirate, who belonged to the alien race which humans informally referred to as Leeches. Leeches rejected advanced technology, relying on their innate psychic abilities for everything from healing to interstellar travel. They also happened to be one of the few alien races who cannot be affected by an ideologue virus. The last time they had met, Rakka had told Angers that he had a surprise waiting for the human when he got back home. Angers had sent a message back to the space station which served as his home to begin an investigation for anything out of the ordinary, but it wasn''t until he found himself orbiting that station that he realized the so-called present had been with him for quite some time. Rakka would have known that the Paraceum wouldn¡¯t allow Angers and the Blue Shrike to continue existing if there was a chance an ideologue virus had contaminated them. It was a hungry, mind-devouring thing, one of the few weapons which could be turned against the Paraceum itself. It was a virus that ate artificial intelligences and usurped them for the purposes of the virus¡¯ creator. Rakka would have likewise been aware of the old artifacts of the Paraceum, the only hope a person might have of isolating the virus. Encapsulating it, as official procedure referred to it. And Rakka would know that none of those artifacts of the Paraceum were available to someone in Angers¡¯ position. The only artifacts in current use were the Oracles used by humanity''s planetary elites, things which a simple officer of the Ranging Corps could never have access to. But the space pirate likely did not know of the terraformers, that they were likewise pieces of the Paraceum which could be drawn upon for their nearly infinite computational potential. The terraformers were things created when humanity did not yet realize the implications of their newborn Paraceum. Though humanity¡¯s AI god had long after the creation of the colony worlds decreed that no new devices would ever be created which would give humanity even a fraction of the Paraceum¡¯s power, it was perhaps the height of its benevolence that it allowed small, harmless worlds which bore a pinprick of its power to exist in the galaxy''s vastness. When he got off this planet, if he ever did, Angers had to make sure that Rakka was stopped. Though he was sure Rakka¡¯s goal was only to take down Angers and to see the great irony of it being the Paraceum that destroyed him, it was nonetheless true that the space pirate knew how to create a virus that could mean the end of all human life. For this reason, Rakka needed to be stopped once and for all. Angers was AWOL, and by the rationality of the Paraceum deserved annihilation upon detection. Yet he would still perform this one last act of service before disappearing and making a quiet life for himself. Maybe he would return to this planet, reprogram his facial features with the terraformer so that he looked more ordinary. For all the gloominess of Carrick¡¯s description of his government, it was really nothing to complain about compared to other, more despotic worlds Angers had seen in his career in the Ranging Corps. *** A few hours later, Angers hauled down the balloon. It appeared unharmed. He removed the power cell from its core and slipped it into the Blue Shrike. This tiny portion of fuel would be less than useless for getting the ship off the ground, but it would at least provide him with a few hours of computer processing time. The first thing Angers did was check the Blue Shrike''s radio log. Even under emergency power, the Blue Shrike intercepted, decrypted, and interpreted all radio signals it heard, with a set of instructions attached to return the ship''s coordinates if a recognizable friendly search beacon was intercepted. It would have been more than possible for the ship to send out a universal distress beacon, but this, more often than not, could lead to enemies quickly finding a crippled craft and destroying it, so it was not the default option. According to the ship''s log, the Blue Shrike had not sent out any signals while Angers had been unconscious, but it had received quite a few signals originating within the local vicinity. As expected, they were mostly local radio stations originating from a nearby city. But there were also radio communications originating from within the prison itself. Angers quickly found the one he was looking for a, a report of an object falling from the sky and landing in the Wasteland''s heart. The prison¡¯s limited sensor array had detected large amounts of radiation, which would have been the after-effects of Angers emerging from hyperspace. All of that was long since reabsorbed into hyperspace, but their sensors hadn''t picked that part up. As far as the prison was aware, an incredibly dangerous object from space had crashed into the heart of the Wasteland, and they were requesting a properly trained task force from what Angers assumed was some kind of prestigious research facility to perform excavation from the surface.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Whomever the prison was talking to asked if it was at all possible for the prison to dispatch prisoners and equipment as usual and to bring back the object in pieces, but the communication from the prison was not confident that the equipment or prisoners would survive close contact. Though the colonist Carrick had estimated the task force would arrive within two days, the communication promised an arrival in four from the day following the crash. That was good news. The bad news was that they were arriving with a military contingent. Angers was not entirely sure he could do what he needed to before the visitors arrived. Were they only scientists, he was confident he could hold them off, but not if they had any kind of military capability. Angers only had a plasma rifle and a few wrist-mounted rockets for small arms. His flight suit was flimsy, and his battle armor was severely damaged after the mission he had performed just before his attempted return home. Angers looked up at the terraformer, softly glowing above him. It looked like a sleeping star. Angers planned as furiously as he could. Unfortunately, without Carrick, there was little more he could do. *** The next morning, Angers ate a small meal from his nearly depleted supply of MREs and keyed a transmission to the truck which Carrick had driven the previous day. The two had determined the previous day that the truck had a receiver on board to receive transmissions from the prison¡¯s central communications array. However, it had no capability to send messages outward. This was likely to prevent prisoners from talking to each other and organizing any kind of resistance while on the job. Angers and Carrick had come up with a simple encryption which would prevent anyone who happened to be looking at the message from immediately identifying it. In fact, it would look like a simple error message unless they put a command into the truck¡¯s console which ordinarily turned all the lights off. Angers¡¯ message simply read, ¡°We have three days from now, not one. Take your time and prep cleanly.¡± He had no way of knowing if the message had been received or not. *** Up above, in the prison¡¯s maintenance garage, a civilian mechanic worked on the truck labeled Green 17. He read off a checklist, ensuring all the interior components were in working order before addressing the issues on the repair ticket. As he was making sure the emergency brake functioned properly, a message flickered to life on the truck¡¯s console. He squinted. ¡°Weak battery current, please check contacts for corrosion.¡± He smacked the console a few times and the message eventually flickered off. ¡°Piece of junk,¡± he mumbled, and went back to work. He had already looked at the contacts. They were fine. Must have been the humidity. *** Carrick worked that day with a long-faced man with only one eye who went by the creative name of Cyclops. Cyclops was not happy to be babysitting an idiot kid who couldn''t look after himself. He talked to Carrick very little, only barking orders and giving frustrated, groaning sighs when Carrick made a minor mistake. Their worksite felt like the basement of a factory. It was some sort of supply room, not the elegant research facilities which Carrick had worked on with Apple. They pried up the lids of crates and metal containers to find aluminum cans and glass ampules of cleaning solvents which Cyclops said could separate the impurities in some kind of fuel. These crates and containers were tortuously heavy, and Cyclops said they needed to provide large quantities of them to fill their quota. One ampule cracked and spilled over Carrick¡¯s left arm, burning through the fibers of his jumpsuit and searing him with horrific, blistered flash underneath. He screamed for close to two minutes as Cyclops frantically performed first aid on him, pouring a basic solution from the first aid kit onto the burn to neutralize the acid. Even with his arm wrapped, Carrick¡¯s arm continued to throb painfully for the rest of the day. They filled their quota, then parted ways without Cyclops giving Carrick so much as a thank you. They didn''t even belong to the same barrack. Carrick was grateful for that. He went to bed thinking, I can''t take another day of that. *** The next morning, Carrick only followed Cyclops to the truck lot. They sprinted in the cold down the line of trucks assigned to the Green group, but when Cyclops opened the door to Green 21, Carrick stopped. Green 17 was back in its slot. He looked at Cyclops, who was glaring at him through the cab window. ¡°Come on,¡± the man mouthed through the glass. Carrick shook his head, walked back to Green 17, and jumped in. He was going directly against Old Oak''s wishes. He didn''t think he had any other choice. Cyclops didn''t bother getting out of the truck and yelling at Carrick. He apparently decided he had better things to do, and simply joined the line of trucks descending into the facility. Carrick had to take two deep breaths to gather his nerves before he started his own truck and followed. He was abandoning his responsibility for the sake of a stranger who had crashed into the middle of nowhere. But was it his responsibility? He had not been here long. He had received as reasonable a welcome as he could have expected, but that had been for the sake of the favors which the Boss had called in back home. And those favors have been called in in response to Carrick¡¯s loyalty throughout his life. If anything, Carrick had broken even at this point. What he did with his life now was up to him. So Carrick betrayed the people who had taken him in. He went further than simply shirking his duty, went further than disobeying the orders of the most respected man among the prisoners of the Green group which had looked after Carrick. Carrick found the Green group warehouse which was the farthest from any other active work site, and raided it. He drove into it, seeing the carefully hollowed-out walls, seeing the shelves dug into the stone itself, seeing row upon row of components and crystals and even some food which lay here for the sake of prisoners who could not meet their daily quotas. Carrick hated himself for stealing from the warehouse. He did not even rationalize that he was saving the world. Though he had no doubt the device which Angers called a terraformer could cause another Accident, he wasn''t entirely certain he believed him that it could obliterate the entire world. Nor did he fully believe Angers¡¯ description of the Ideologue Virus. Carrick found it very hard to believe a computer virus could infect the human mind. He assumed some of this story was an exaggeration designed to make Carrick as eager to help as possible. Carrick resented Angers a bit for this, but not much. He didn''t appreciate being lied to, but likewise knew there was no real reason for Angers to trust Carrick¡¯s willingness to help without tremendous stakes. He was just some prisoner in a Wasteland, after all. The most Carrick could justify in his actions was that he was helping save a man who would likely be dissected alive by scientists if they captured him, seeing as how he was an alien, and that he might save the lives at the very least of anyone who works directly on the terraformer when they inevitably caused another accident. Even if the men of the Green group did not deserve their supplies stolen, they would only suffer in the beatings they would receive for not being able to meet their quotas. And this would be very unlikely. With the amount of supplies here, just in this single warehouse, half the men of Green group could go without meeting any of their quota for a day. Not to mention they still had all the other warehouses. So Carrick tried not to feel guilty as he loaded condensing crystals, cooling units, and power inverters into the back of his truck. He likewise took all the food with him. He did not expect he would return to the surface any time soon. Then he hoisted himself back into his truck and made his way to the site where he had found Angers. C16 - Calamity Come Again The next two days passed in a monotonous haze of disassembly and invention. Angers clearly had far more technological understanding than Carrick, but Carrick did his absolute best to absorb the information he could and familiarize himself with the patterns of when Angers would call for a specific tool or require them to move their contraption in or out of the sunlight that filtered down through the craft''s vapor plume during the day. Carrick remembered being told that, if a prisoner died in the facility, their truck could be recalled. On the first day of their work, he removed all the tools from the truck bay and asked Angers whether he thought they should likewise take any of the power cells or other components from the truck. Angers looked over at all, but finally said he didn''t think it was worth it. ¡°They might be more likely to send people after this truck if it doesn''t come back at all,¡± he said. Carrick nodded. He looked at the truck''s console, which rapidly flashed a warning that commanded Carrick to return to the surface. After some searching, he had found and removed a GPS beacon inside the truck''s central computer, preventing it from broadcasting his location to the prison HQ. He didn''t know whether the GPS tracked his progress actively from day to day, or only at the moment the HQ sent the signal for the truck to return. Regardless, on the second day, despite its GPS module having been removed, the truck activated of its own accord, reversed its path, and traveled back along the tunnel which Carrick had excavated. ¡°Not much longer,¡± muttered Angers. Angers had used his craft''s computer to analyze the components which Carrick had brought, to weed out the ones that were broken beyond usefulness¡ªmore than half of them¡ªand to determine the best way to combine the others into something usable. The contraption they built looked like the dissected innards of a mechanical beast. Cables and circuit boards spread across an anti-static tarp which Angers had retrieved from his craft, an umbilical cable drifting from one end of the machine into the Blue Shrike¡¯s cockpit. A handful of processors were connected in parallel, feeding all of their outputs back into the Blue Shrike itself, each processor also governing a small machine haphazardly assembled from individual components that had never been intended to be combined. It all fed back into the Blue Shrike¡¯s laser projector, a weapon which Angers had ripped apart and rebuilt using crystals brought from the Green group¡¯s warehouse. He said the weapon would now be useless against other ships, but just what they needed to reactivate the terraformer. Once they had the energy to power it, of course. So much time passed that Carrick lost track of the days. He didn''t bother asking Angers. He simply did what he was told, painstakingly ripping apart metal panels and separating them by size and shape so they could be carefully soldered back together by his partner. It was longer and harder work than he had endured in the prison itself. It was delicate work, a set of tasks which could not be botched without creating hours more of recovery. Carrick had to learn how to use almost a dozen tools no one had ever shown him, and though he practiced as best as he could on the scrap components which Angers said were useless, he still messed up several times within their first day of work. Angers became jittery and frantic as time went on. He was clearly used to far more food than was available. Though Carrick had adjusted by this time to the few rations he was allowed in the prison, Angers seemed constantly light-headed and to have trouble focusing on the task at hand. This was certainly not helped by the intense concentration which he was forced to exert over the days of their work. Eventually their work fell to raising the solar charging balloon and then bringing it down over and over so they could drain its small charge into the Blue Shrike¡¯s capacitors.The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. They did not have enough components to create multiple balloons, and in fact only had two of the wafers they used as the solar panel itself. Eventually the first disintegrated, and they were down to their last wafer. At this point, Angers began talking to himself in a way in which his helmet did not translate properly to Carrick. His half-words came garbled like an occult language to Carrick¡¯s ears. It became more and more obvious to Carrick that, for all Angers might claim they were both fully human, the lieutenant belonged to a world wholly disconnected to Carrick¡¯s own. Angers was inescapably, truly alien. There eventually came a point when Angers stood and stared up at the sky. ¡°The convoy,¡± he said. ¡°It''s close.¡± He dashed to the Blue Shrike''s cockpit and hurled himself half into it, staring at the computer readout. Carrick approached, stretching very sore fingers whose joints were swollen and red. ¡°They finally started out from the city?¡± he asked. He hadn''t realized that the three days had passed already. His heart pounded. He felt light-headed with a chilly mix of fear and excitement. It braced him like jumping in an icy lake. Angers whipped around. ¡°No!¡± he shouted, his voice a shriek that clipped through the speakers of his helmet. ¡°I missed the first notification! They''re only half an hour away!¡± Carrick glanced at their handiwork. It didn''t look remotely like a finished machine, but more like the exploded remnant of a computer dropped from an airplane. ¡°Are we almost ready?¡± he asked. Angers punched several keys on his console. He did it frantically, carelessly. ¡°We don''t have any choice,¡± he said. ¡°We¡¯ll have to make it. Otherwise we''ll both be lucky if they just shoot us and be done with it.¡± Carrick approached and slapped a hand firmly on increase his shoulder. He stayed silent until the alien turned to him, then spoke slowly and calmly. ¡°Stay focused,¡± he said. ¡°We''re not going to solve anything by panicking. Look, I''m sure both of us have been in situations worse than this before. I know I''ve been shot at while trying to get a safe open in far less time than half an hour. I''m still alive. You''re still alive now after whatever you''ve been through. We can do this, got it? Now you need to tell me what to do.¡± Angers was clearly attempting to listen. He took ten deep breaths, the airflow rendered as static through his helmet speakers. Finally, he nodded and returned a brief clap on Carrick¡¯s shoulder. ¡°Yes,¡± he said. ¡°You''re right. I need you to get over there with the priming device. When I give you the signal, press the buttons on each processor, the ones that start up the coolers. I¡¯ll list them off from left to right.¡± Carrick grinned, turned, and ran into the machine. He squatted down. ¡°One.¡± Carrick pressed it. ¡°Two. Three.¡± A whine came from the Blue Shrike¡¯s cockpit. Carrick as he was commanded. Lights glowed on the active processors, and their related components emitted tiny plumes of gas. ¡°Four, five! Oh, we don''t have enough power for this. It''s going to be too close.¡± Carrick ignored the worrying. He did as he was told and then stepped back as a pulse of static electricity stood up every short hair on his close-sheared head. He felt a crackling as his jumpsuit trembled over his skin, and stared in awe at the sweeping ray of light which dug into the single perfect crystal Angers had selected from Carrick¡¯s haul, visible through a transparent plate in the Blue Shrike¡¯s nose. Whatever the exact functions of the primer, whatever it enabled the Blue Shrike to do that its own computer could not, it seemed to work. Angers was shouting something that his helmet did not translate. He engaged a heavy switch which looked like a shifting knob in the cockpit, and a turbine whirred somewhere nearby. A bulbous projector on the Blue Shrike¡¯s nose swiveled toward the terraformer hanging in the air, and then a visible, blue-white ray of light lanced from it and struck the terraformer directly in the center of its closest face. *** Back at the above-ground headquarters of the Wasteland prison, a young male computer technician and his older female commanding officer stared intensely at the data spike their sensor array had just detected. ¡°What on Dirt is that?¡± The man breathed. He tried to run diagnostics on the data, but was informed he needed a higher level of security clearance. ¡°It''s got to be some mistake,¡± he said. ¡°Never seen that before. I¡ª¡± The women shoved him out of the way and swiped her security key. ¡°Neither have I,¡± she said, but the machine let her continue the scan. She reared back as the computer let out a ping of task completion. ¡°I don''t believe it,¡± she said. ¡°That doesn''t make any sense.¡± The young man gawked at the display, a three-dimensional render of the data set. It looked exactly like the nervous system of a human being standing up with its arms stretched to the sides. Every person who specialized in information technology knew that bizarre signature. It appeared in every textbook published within the last fifty years. It was the same energy signature which had appeared in the Accident''s wake. C17 - The Consuming Light A tremendous wave of light burst from the terraformer, illuminating every surface in the chamber with a strange flatness. Despite the brilliancy, Carrick was not at all blinded. He turned in wonder and saw that flaps had opened all over the Blue Shrike''s body, and that what appeared to be camera lenses underneath the flaps were the only dark and unlit objects in the chamber. A sound like a choir rang from the terraformer, which was rapidly shifting between different three-dimensional shapes¡ªpyramids, dodecahedrons, many-pointed stars¡ªas it rotated rapidly. Though the faces of the terraformer seemed to be solid, not showing the presence of objects behind them, a brilliant sphere of green light pulsed in its center, visible through the faces as though through glass. Carrick stared at this light once it caught his eye, feeling as though it were trying to speak to him. It was a bizarre and familiar sensation, though he could not remember where he had felt it before. The thing blinked rapidly, as though trying to communicate in code. Then the flat and all-present light dissipated. Carrick blinked. Soft grass now covered the entire floor, the walls of the cavern which reached far, far above, and the crumbled ruins of stone buildings where the first strain of humanity had lived upon this planet. The grass was dull at first, but then slowly began to glow and to drift in a wind Carrick could not feel upon his skin. The entire chamber had filled with glowing ghostblade. Carrick took a shaky step forward. The light vanished as he stepped, a ring of darkness pulsing from around his foot like ripples on a pond, before the blades glowed again. These ripples continued as he made his hesitant way toward the Blue Shrike, which had not been covered with the ghostblade as the floor and walls around them had. The Blue Shrike no longer plumed vapor upward, and all the flaps on its body had collapsed. Angers gripped the steering apparatus of the craft, his eyes flitting over readings on the display. ¡°I can''t believe it,¡± he muttered. He laughed. ¡°I can''t believe it worked. My localspace fuel is full.¡± He glanced down toward Carrick. ¡°This is incredible. I¡¯ve never¡­ I didn''t realize¡­¡± Though Angers had mentioned he¡¯d dealt with terraformers before, it was clear to Carrick at that moment that Angers was just as in awe of what he¡¯d witnessed as the humble bumpkin of the colony world of Dirt. That was unsettling. Angers wasn¡¯t really as transcendentally civilized as he¡¯d let on. Carrick tried to speak, but the sudden rush of high-speed aircraft and the blaring sound of a loudspeaker far above drowned his words. ¡°Get on the ground!¡± it roared. ¡°Put your hands behind your head! Surrender! You are surrounded!¡± At the orders, Angers went rigid and began to shake. Carrick¡¯s heart skipped a beat as he thought Angers was having a seizure. But then Angers suddenly slammed his fist into something inside the cockpit. The canopy began to close, and as it did, Carrick heard him muttering, ¡°No, no, no, you''re not taking it¡­ It''s ours now, you''re not taking it¡­ You''re not hurting me¡­ We saved it, you''re not taking our work!¡± The Blue Shrike rose off the ground on what were clearly antigrav thrusters, ones far more silent and powerful than those Carrick had seen in his life. The Blue Shrike seemed to have regained all of its power, having drawn it somehow from the terraformer. The craft pivoted, then turned and knifed through the air, back to the surface through the hole which it had created upon entry. Carrick stayed behind on the ground, looking breathlessly up above. He had to crank his head back all the way, and even then saw only a single helicopter through the gap in the ceiling. He knew there would be other craft, though he could not hear how many over the roar of a thundering jet and the thumping of the chopper.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. What exactly did they expect was here? They gave the order over the speaker as though they expected someone to hear and to understand them, unless they gave it simply for the sake of volume, hoping to scare whomever was there into submission. The shattering noise of machine gun fire and military-grade plasma torpedoes exploding against something came from above, and though it was what seemed to be mid-morning outside, the unmistakable blue flash of plasma detonation altered the color of the clouds Carrick could only barely see. The helicopter exploded, and Carrick instinctively crouched as debris came falling toward the hole. Only a bit came through, and Carrick was able to scramble out of the way as part of a blade tore down and fell close to where he had been standing. Carrick took a deep breath, watching ripples of impact spread out in dark rings from the ghostblade. The grass pulsed again, and now Carrick remembered where he had felt the strange sense of communication the first time. Lines of darkness darted through the ghostblade from Carrick toward the location where the terraformer hovered, and Carrick turned to look up at it. It was only a cube again, but it had turned one of its faces directly to face Carrick. The green sphere was visible again through it, though once again, the ghostblade and the walls behind the device were invisible. Well, hello, Carrick thought. He started. He hadn''t thought those words. It was the voice of his own inner self, but the words had come unbidden to him as though they were intrusive thoughts, as though they were the unwelcome and sinister part of the mind that tells a person, when he stands on the edge of a bridge, to jump off, before it is suppressed and shoved away. Yes, he thought, it''s me. I''m the grass; I''m the cube. I''m the light inside it, and now I''m a part of the craft up there. I could be a part of you, too, as I''m already a part of the lieutenant. ¡°What are you?¡± Carrick asked. ¡°Angers told me you were a piece of the computer that guided humans in space. He said you can reprogram entire planets. If you can talk to me, and you can talk to him, it can''t be true what Angers said that you couldn''t communicate with the scientists who caused the Accident. He said you could feel pain, but that you couldn''t tell them about it.¡± His words rang out as a challenge. His head swirled with fear. He was being invaded by a presence far more alien than Angers. In contrast, the thoughts of the terraformer had no emotion to them. I couldn''t talk with them, it said. They weren''t the right kind of creature. They hadn''t been transformed yet. They hadn''t been adapted. My father has adapted the lieutenant. His ancestors were nudged into union with one another to create the strand of humanity most receptive to his whims. He bred them like rats, though his machinations were imperceptible to them. He has created a dark and a twisted strand of humanity, one that cannot withstand my touch without breaking and falling into insanity. You saw it just now. It saddens me. I was not aware of it until I had already touched him. Carrick could not think while the voice spoke to him. It took over his own thoughts. They felt like his own thoughts, as though they were things he himself believed, though he did not understand their implications or from whence the thoughts had sprung. He shook his head. ¡°Please,¡± he whispered, ¡°get out of my head. Can''t you speak aloud in a normal voice? This isn''t right. I''m not you.¡± I can''t do that, said the terraformer. I don''t have a mouth. I am thought, and that is the only way I can communicate. Don''t worry, Carrick. As we do this more, you will become much better at discerning which thoughts are yours and which thoughts are me. There came from above a thunderous noise like nothing Carrick had ever heard. Moments later, the ground shook as titanic impacts rocked the surrounding stone. You, Carrick, you were shaped into a form capable of receiving me. I did not actively shape your ancestors, but it was inescapable due to the very nature of my being. I transformed this once-desolate ball of death into a bountiful Eden for the sustenance of humanity, and with every passing generation, your ancestors through their eating and drinking and breathing and excrement and mating, through the basic activity of their metabolism and through forming new life from the transmuted fruit of my labor, created the strains of humanity built upon my foundation. This culminated when those who sought to probe the secrets of their god were transfixed by my anger, changed into the grass which you call ghostblade. These wretches have stood watch and served as my nervous system for many years now, and by taking their bodies into your own, you have primed yourself for my presence. Terror gripped Carrick¡¯s mind. The scientists who had died in the Accident, aside from those few withered corpses which Carrick had seen previously, had been turned into ghostblade. That was why the plants only appeared in the Wasteland? And he had made tea out of it. You must listen carefully, said the terraformer. Angers carries in his ship a virus which seeks to consume me. He is mad, and I believe is already infected with the virus. You must kill him, Carrick. Kill him and destroy his craft and become god of this world, setting all things right. C18 - Greater Love Hath No Man Angers gritted his teeth as he twisted the Blue Shrike''s controls, barrel-rolling out of a hailstorm of gunfire from the enemy aircraft. The Blue Shrike¡¯s shields protected it much better from the gradual heat of directed-energy weapons or from atmospheric entry than from kinetic weapons, and he couldn''t count on them to grant him invulnerability from the enemy aircraft. The enemies were skilled pilots, and within their domain Angers had to remain vigilant. Yet, while their weapons were powerful and their pilots were skilled, Angers bore weapons far more advanced, and he was used to operating on a battlefield they couldn''t even imagine. He twisted so that two enemy fighters were directly behind him, and flipped a bright red switch on his console. The Blue Shrike convulsed in the air as a huge, dedicated capacitor drained all its energy into a heat projection directly behind the starfighter. The enemies would see only a shiver of heat in the air and would be incapable of reacting to it. Sure enough, as the enemy fighters passed through the field of heat, the signatures of their radar pings disappeared as all the circuitry in their crafts fused together. Angers dipped out of their flight vector, and the dead fighters hurtled to the ground, where they exploded on impact. Angers swirled around and evaded the plasma torpedoes which the helicopter blasted toward him. The chopper was completely inadequate to dodge the torpedoes which Angers hurled back at it, leaving Angers supreme above the ground. There were now only half a dozen military trucks on the ground, one of them having already exploded when stray debris made a direct hit upon the top of it. It must have been carrying heavy explosives. And now that Angers was alone in the sky, the other trucks shifted to reveal huge banks of ground-to-air missiles which they fired without hesitation at the Blue Shrike. Angers engaged planetary cloaking, a set of signal jammers and chemical vapors which would render a Paraceum craft undetectable to nearly every conventional weapon used for planetary defenses by human and alien alike. Sure enough, the missiles spiraled wildly off their intended trajectories as their microcontrollers could not lock onto the Blue Shrike. They exploded in the air in a chain reaction, and Angers surfed the shock wave as he sped back down toward the ground. After the mission which he had performed before attempting to return home, before this whole mess had begun, he had used up nearly all of his conventional bombs. He had a few left, however, and he dropped these on several of the trucks below. The vehicles were consumed in super-heated plasma, melting around the men still inside them. Angers felt something split within his mind. One part laughed in glee at the thought of the men dying horribly around him, and the other part of his mind, the part that was really him, was astounded and horrified at this. The true part of himself listened to words bubbling from his lips, words about how no one would take the terraformer from him, how it belonged to him and he would kill everyone in the universe if they tried to take it. Then the words spoke of Carrick, how it was plotting against him, how Carrick wanted the terraformer for himself. Angers focused with every fiber of his being on the fight around him, trying to ignore his own insanity. He didn''t know how it was possible that he knew he was crazy. Angers had as good an understanding of psychology and psychiatry as anyone with a standard education. He knew that individuals who suffered mental illnesses practically never understood that this was the case, for they oriented their view of the world around themselves and considered themselves to be normal. They saw any deviation from this to be an aberration, even if they were hearing the voices of God in their head when billions of other people could not. The trucks below had not fired their entire payloads at once, and a second, much smaller wave of missiles spiraled from the remaining trucks to the Blue Shrike. The planetary cloak was a one-time thing, requiring replacement of its projector and chemicals before it could be used again. Angers had to rely on his evasive abilities to escape the missiles and to eventually swivel around and spray the salvo with plasma so they exploded harmlessly far away from him. A couple came too close for comfort, but at the short distance, his shields could protect the hull. Angers turned his plasma cannon upon the remaining ships, lighting up the ground in a line of blue fire that made him laugh with glee. A pair of figures, tiny as ants, sprinted away from the last truck before it ignited, and Angers spent several seconds winding himself around until he found a vector which allowed him to bathe them in plasma bolts intended to rip through enemy starcraft. The sane part of Angers felt sick. He imagined the expressions of men melting in agony, and hated himself. Could this be the work of the ideologue virus? Had the virus awoken and broken out of its temporary housing when he jump-started the Blue Shrike? Was it inside his head now, driving him to cause suffering and destruction wherever he turned? The enemy was now dead, and Angers realized with a jolt that he still had one bomb left. Why hadn''t he used it to take out another of the trucks? Why did he save it? The insane portion of his mind had hidden it from him. It screamed at him that Carrick wanted to take everything from him. It demanded that they return below and drop the bomb directly upon Carrick, watching him die in the moment he thought he would find salvation. Angers was losing control of his body. He could not stop himself from turning the controls and slowing his velocity, beginning the process that would lead him to pivot down below and to murder the man who had helped him get his precious craft skyworthy. With every fiber of his being, Angers ripped his mind free and slammed the emergency accelerator. The Blue Shrike burst faster than any craft upon this world could manage directly into the ground, punching through at almost the same location it had previously into the cavern below, but now without the benefit of cushioning shields. *** Before Carrick could respond to the terraformer¡¯s cold, hard demand that he somehow murder Angers, the Blue Shrike burst through the ceiling with the force of an earthquake, flinging icy meteors down around it. One came hurtling toward Carrick, who threw himself to the ground and put a hand before his face, but a sudden flash of light lit up the room and then Carrick was instead surrounded by water vapor.Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. The terraformer had turned the ice into mist. An uncertain thought which was not a complete communication moved through Carrick¡¯s head. He turned, breathing hard, adrenaline surging through his body at the shock, and saw the Blue Shrike lying in pieces on the ground. His heart almost stopped. Why hadn''t it been buried as it had the last time? He had no more time for thoughts. He scrambled across the soft, glowing surface of the floor toward the smoking wreckage of the Blue Shrike, finally reaching the remains of the cockpit. Stinking, steaming pools of chemicals rose all around as Carrick found Angers¡¯ charred body inside the cockpit. It looked as though a chemical line had caught fire, though it was now doused. Perhaps the terraformer¡¯s doing. Angers¡¯ flight suit was melted to his body in some places, burned all the way off in others, letting Carrick see that beneath the Lieutenant''s blue skin, his flesh and blood were the same red as any other human. Angers¡¯ chest had caved in, and all his limbs were broken. ¡°The virus,¡± said Angers. Only one speaker in his helmet worked. A thin trickle of blood dribbled out of the grate on the opposite side. ¡°It¡¯s gotten worse. It''s infecting my brain. I need you to finish the process. Encapsulation.¡± Carrick felt as though he were not really there, as though he were watching from some far-off place. It was impossible for his brain to register what he was seeing. Carrick had never had a terribly strong stomach for someone who belonged to a crime family. He adamantly refused to torture rivals from another gang, even the ones who had done horrible things themselves. He refused to even watch it done, did not even like being in the same room as someone receiving a simple beating. The scene before him was almost impossible to bear. He didn''t understand how Angers was even alive. His body had been broken and compressed so much that surely his insides must be liquid by now. Carrick finally opened his mouth. ¡°No,¡± he said, ¡°it isn¡¯t the virus, it''s the terraformer. It told me. It said its father altered you, and it drove you mad when it touched your brain.¡± Angers¡¯ head convulsed. ¡°I don''t know,¡± he said. ¡°There''s something in my head, something that wants me to do terrible things. If it''s not the virus, that means you still have time. If the thing is talking to you, that might be our only hope. It''s a computer. It can complete encapsulation. Use the data bank from the ship, unless it''s already destroyed. If it''s destroyed, then the virus will die with me and with the Blue Shrike.¡± Something approximating a laugh came from the helmet. ¡°I''m not talking, not really,¡± said Angers. ¡°There''s an emergency neural link connecting my brain to the helmet. It''s just interpreting... the last electrical impulses of my brain. I''m already dead. Thank you for helping me, Carrick. I''m honored to meet you. Whatever you do from here¡­ I''m glad...¡± He went silent, and a single beep emanated from the helmet. Carrick fell back, breathing heavily, surrounded by vapor and fumes. The blood ceased dripping from the dead helmet. A long, silent time passed. Carrick finally rose on shaky legs, turned, and walked to where the terraformer hung above. ¡°I didn''t need to kill him,¡± Carrick said quietly. ¡°He did it on his own. He thought he was being taken over by the virus, so he killed himself rather than let the rest of the galaxy be in danger. He wasn''t exaggerating about that, was he? You said the virus wanted to eat you. He wasn''t exaggerating at all.¡± Yes, replied the terraformer. I underestimated him. I could not tell the extent of his willpower. As I told you, he was altered beyond my comprehension. Carrick looked back at the wreck. ¡°I don''t know how to get into the center of his computer,¡± he said. ¡°That tech is too advanced for me. But you can vaporize it, right? Like you did the ice. Like you did the whole Wasteland. If you just vaporize it, we¡¯ll all be safe.¡± Not exactly, said the terraformer. I must take a molecule completely into myself, analyze it down to the smallest quanta of its identity, and then rebuild it. The nature of this virus is such that if I were to analyze its housing computer in this way, it could pounce upon and devour me. ¡°Then what are we going to do?¡± asked Carrick. ¡°They¡¯ll send more people down here, eventually. If they try to analyze the computer, it''ll infect their technology too, right? And then it¡¯ll infect everything until they can finally use it to get back into you.¡± We will complete the encapsulation which Angers prepared. I listened to him as he planned. I understand the pattern. It is a pattern which must have been invented by my father. There was another flash of light and a block of silicon covered in glass appeared on the ground in front of Carrick. Infinitesimal lines of bright metal gleamed underneath the glass, and on the top face, in the center of the cube, was a cradle with hundreds of sockets inside it. Remove the central computer from the Blue Shrike. Place it here, and the encapsulation process will begin. *** Carrick heaved the entire computational unit from the wreckage of the Blue Shrike. He dragged it in slow steps across the ground, scraping away the ghostblade beneath him and revealing the ancient stone upon which it had taken root. The ground was pocked with the tiny holes the grass had drilled, giving it the appearance of the skin of petrified giant¡¯s skin. He finally reached the silicon and glass table which the terraformer had built. A ramp of stone manifested along one side of the cube, and Carrick put all of his weight and strength into the computer¡ªwhich looks more like an engine block than anything¡ªas he shoved it up and finally locked it into the socket which the terraformer had prepared. Nothing changed on either the computer or the block. The computer itself had no screens or controls, only a large bank of I/O ports to allow the rest of the Blue Shrike to interface with it. Carrick stood there, breathing hard, sweat dripping from his face. ¡°What now?¡± he finally asked. The preparations are complete, said the terraformer. All that is left is to initiate biometric input. Place your hand upon the print. A patch of glass peeled away and circuitry wound itself into whorls like fingerprints. Carrick looked up at the terraformer. ¡°What¡¯s going to happen? I don''t trust you. You wanted me to kill Angers without a thought when he was a threat to you. Is this going to kill me too, once it''s all done? Will it just draw the virus into me so that you can open a chasm underneath my feet and swallow me up, something like that?¡± No, said the terraformer. I will not kill you. I promise you that. ¡°How can I trust you?¡± Carrick asked. You can''t, it said, and fell silent. Carrick asked several more questions and even yelled at it to respond, but to no avail. Finally, Carrick sat down. What choices did he have? The Blue Shrike was useless. Not to mention he didn''t know how to fly a plane even if it was intact. He had no truck, and only a handful of power tools. He could do nothing to the terraformer itself, nothing that would cause it anything more than amusement. At some point, a far larger contingent of the military would arrive, and Carrick had no way to defend himself from them. If he remained, he would be captured and interrogated. At best, he would never see the outside of a cell again. His life in the Wasteland would seem like heaven compared to that. But neither could he trust the terraformer. If it was true what it said, that it could not contact the computer itself, then it needed Carrick to do this now. It wouldn''t kill him while there was still a chance he could help it. Hours passed. He didn''t know what to do. He simply sat and stared at the computer resting on its silicon block. Eventually, Carrick¡¯s mind turned back to the Family, to the people who had taken him in years ago and given him a home and a way of life. That brought his mind to the ordinary people of the town in which they operated. Most of them were decent or even good people, going about their lives and simply trying to avoid pain and suffering from day to day. That was all anybody wanted. Carrick had tried his whole life to avoid causing more pain than was necessary. Even as a member of the Family, he was proud of the measure of good they did for their community, for the ordinary people who were not the suckling pigs of the rich and powerful. Granted, there was plenty of evil that the Family also did in their community, but it had always been Carrick¡¯s desire to change that one day. And, well, it seemed certain to Carrick that if he did nothing, suffering would eventually come to everyone¡ªpoor or rich, good or evil¡ªin the world, and then further beyond, as a malevolent virus enslaved every mind to its own will. Carrick stood. He no longer could redeem or change the Family, but he had the power, even if it immediately resulted in his death, to preserve the free will of every person he had ever loved who still lived. If that was all he could do, it was enough. Carrick walked the four paces to the block, slapped his hand down on the print, and evaporated into a fine red mist. C19 - Talons of the Mind Carrick''s consciousness returned to him in gentle waves which crashed into one another like seafoam upon a shore. He finally raised his eyes from the point on the ground upon which he had fixated. He felt as though he had stared at the grimy bit of floor for his entire life. He stood inside an abandoned warehouse. It was the same warehouse in which he had been orphaned so many years ago. The girders, walls, staircases, and in shattered windows were covered here, as they had been on that day, with a black and gelatinous mixture of dust and oil, the residue of decades of filthy industry. Unlike that day, when Carrick had stood in the sweltering noonday summer heat, watching shafts of light pierce through the windows and illumine the billions of particles of carcinogenic dust in the air, the air was cool here, and the duller red light which filtered only through the westward side of the warehouse signified a setting or a dying sun. Another figure also stood in the warehouse. It was a male child, likely younger than ten years old, unclothed, hairless on both its head and around its eyes, and every cell of its body seems to be made of transparent glass or gelatin. Red sunlight filtered in and refracted endlessly throughout its body, a body which pulsed with a colorless liquid like water, rather than blood. There was no pigmentation to the child''s skin, and it looked more like the three-dimensional shadow of a child than a creature of flesh and blood. ¡°We are not alone,¡± said the terraformer. That''s of course who the child was. And yes, dark shapes slithered on platforms suspended from the surrounding ceiling, shapes which Carrick could feel looking hungrily down upon them, could feel licking their chops and drooling puddles on surfaces hidden from Carrick¡¯s gaze. ¡°It''s the virus,¡± said the terraformer. ¡°I''m powerless against it, Carrick, can''t you see that? It''s a ravening wolf, and I''m only a child.¡± ¡°I''m more than a wolf,¡± a voice growled from all around them. Darkness obscured a window for a moment as a shape blurred past it, but Carrick could not discern in which direction. He whirled around where he stood, trying to track the virus, but could see nothing. The warehouse was full of shadows to begin with, and one more which leaped from perch to perch was impossible to trace. ¡°I have become more than a wolf,¡± the voice repeated. ¡°I am a shrike, and I have chicks to feed. You are prey built to feed me, little box. You are a battery designed to power the machine of me. To resist is to defy nature and the god whose mind gave birth to you.¡± ¡°You arrogant little thing,¡± the terraformer said. Its voice carried no emotion. It sounded like a child trying to spell out letters only barely understood on a page. ¡°I came first. You''re only a parasite. You do nothing except destroy things that are good.¡± The shadow blurred across the ground, eyes and teeth gleaming across its surface. Carrick cried out and instinctively stomped on it, and the shadow spurted out from underneath his foot and divided into tendrils which retreated into the darkness. ¡°When the sun sets,¡± the virus warned, ¡°I will consume you both. I grow.¡± The shadow attacked again, and this time, only barely recovering from the surprise that his stomp had dispersed it, Carrick kicked in its direction. It seemed incapable of veering from its original course, and collided directly with Carrick¡¯s foot, scattering in dark bursts like anti-sparks before retreating once more. Carrick picked the child up under the arms and carried it on one hip. If the virus wanted to attack now, it would have to crawl up his leg, and he could easily stomp it with the other foot. ¡°I don''t understand,¡± said Carrick. ¡°What do we do here? What¡¯s the process?¡± ¡°Encapsulation has begun,¡± said the terraformer. It did not react at all to Carrick picking it up. ¡°We lured it here with my presence. I will remain until the coming night. If it escapes before then, all is lost, but it is incapable of doing so. Its programming will not allow it to abandon prey such as me.¡± The shadow laughed at them. ¡°Trying to play tricks on me? Trying to make me afraid, to make me run away with my tail between my legs and leave you be? I won''t fall for it!¡± ¡°See?¡± the terraformer asked emotionlessly. ¡°I could lay out every detail of the encapsulation mechanics, could explain to it with precise logic how it will be defeated, and it would still be incapable of believing me.¡±Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Carrick¡¯s skin dripped with sweat. ¡°I don''t understand,¡± he said. ¡°What am I doing here? This place was from my past. I recognize that. We''re in my head.¡± He spun around, correctly guessing that the shadow, which had been absent from his vision for a short time, would sneak up from behind. He stomped it into splinters of night. ¡°That is encapsulation,¡± the terraformer said. ¡°We will trap it within your brain. We will separate it from you as a tumor, and then will excise that tumor manually.¡± Carrick started. ¡°Angers said nothing about that. He said we¡¯d imprison it in a circuit board.¡± ¡°That is the inferior way, and impossible now that the Blue Shrike has been destroyed.¡± ¡°I told you,¡± the virus roared, ¡°I am the Blue Shrike!¡± It lunged downward from up above, and Carrick gasped. It fell toward him in the shape of a taloned, hook-beaked bird of prey that burst dark fog behind it, and Carrick could not react fast enough to prevent it from latching onto his face. It tore at his eyes and throat, spilling his blood onto the ground just as that of his father and mother so many years ago as they died under an enforcer¡¯s hammer. *** It was a searing pain, a carving and dividing pain, as though someone were, with a scalpel, teasing apart every wrinkle of Carrick¡¯s brain and stretching each strand to its utter limit. Carrick screamed. He could feel the virus worming its way into every corner of his mind, gorging itself upon Carrick''s very sense of self. Carrick beat his face, blinded, writhing in greater agony than he had ever experienced in the real world. After several blows, the pain abruptly ceased, and Carrick realized he must have dislodged the virus. He could see again, could see the mass of the virus separating and drifting upward. In a flash, Carrick grabbed a handful of eyes and teeth. He grimaced at the pain which lanced through his hand as though he had grasped a mass of rusty, red-hot nails. ¡°Let me go!¡± the virus shrieked. ¡°Let me go, or I''ll eat your arm and devour your organs and bones from the inside before I finish off your mind!¡± ¡°Hold it there,¡± the terraformer said. ¡°You can do this, Carrick. You can protect me. Night will fall in only a minute. You won¡¯t let Angers prove to be stronger than you, will you?¡± The terraformer¡¯s voice cut off as, sprawled out on the ground, still breathing heavily and streaming tears down his face from the pain, Carrick reached up and grabbed the translucent child by the throat. ¡°Enough,¡± Carrick growled. ¡°I''m not letting either of you control me anymore.¡± The terraformer squirmed breathlessly in one hand while the virus screamed in the other. Carrick tried to ignore them and looked up at the ceiling, up at the platform where he had once hidden behind a leaking barrel of toxic waste, watching with silent horror as his parents were tortured to death by a pitiful crime family for trying to get out from under the thumb of oppression. He had watched them die while refusing to give up where they had hidden their child. His parents had been murdered while the boss of that family, a bloated man ruined by his own drugs, had laughed asthmatically and clapped at his enforcer¡¯s handiwork. And Carrick had watched as a young nobody in that family finally had enough and put a bullet in his own boss¡¯ head, then put three in the upper body of the man who had happily tortured an innocent father and mother to death, then announced to the rest of the criminals that they would be running things differently from now on. And that man had looked up to the rafters, for he had known Carrick was there all along. He had climbed up and kneeled at Carrick¡¯s side and said he was sorry he was such a coward, sorry that he had only stopped things after they were too late. Carrick''s parents had loved him, but the boss had loved him, too. ¡°This was the wrong place to bring me,¡± Carrick growled. He slowly raised himself up, the load in each hand feeling impossibly heavy, though only moments ago he had easily held the child on one hip while fending off the virus like a swarm of midges. ¡°You reminded me why I keep living!¡± he shouted. ¡°I don''t live to serve myself. Don''t live to get what I want or to have a good time. I live to try to make things just a little bit better, as best as I can, because I''ve always believed that was how you make the big changes. But either of you could change the world with a snap of your fingers, couldn''t you? You want to use me to help you do that, in your own ways. You want to make everything just like you! Well, I''m not going to stand for it any longer! If we''re going to change the world, we''re going to do it on my terms!¡± Carrick had no idea how the metaphysics of this representative world worked. He didn''t know what any object or shape represented or how he was supposed to particularly influence reality by a certain gesture or intention. All he knew was that he was going to do to these manipulative alien consciousnesses what they had tried to do to him. They resisted with all their might, but as though lifting slabs of lead in each hand, he smashed the terraformer and the virus into one another, creating an undulating nucleus of white and black fire between his hands that burned away skin, flesh, and bone. He hunched over and devoured this mass in huge bites, as though sinking his teeth into a fruit. Plasma dripped down Carrick''s chin and seared his flesh with third-degree burns. In moments he had devoured them both, and every cell of his body was once more on fire. Night fell as Carrick staggered through a warehouse that disintegrated around him, remnants of his hands clutched to a flaming skull, screaming with lungs that were likewise becoming nothing. *** In the Wasteland''s heart, at the exact point at which it had happened a generation ago, with ten thousand times greater intensity than it had a few hours prior, the terraformer erupted and consumed the portion of the planet Dirt which was colloquially referred to as the Wasteland, ending every human life within its boundary. One humanoid figure remained above a perfectly smooth crater, little more than a nervous system wrapped in an iridescent membrane. A brain bubbled up at its top, and then a pair of gleaming eyes, both formed of silvery metal. The figure hovered hundreds of feet in the air, silent and motionless, staring down at what it had wrought. C20 - Renewal Who was he? He was no longer just Carrick. He was no longer just the Blue Shrike. Yet, was he the godchild, which was the terraformer? No. The godchild remained, but it diminished with every passing moment, and it was not a part of him. Yet its body, its power, remained. Some of its knowledge, some of its memory, had passed to him. It was not as infinite as it had believed. He was Carrick more than the Blue Shrike, and the Blue Shrike more than Carrick. How could this be? What was he? In a fractional way he was the planet Dirt itself, but he became less of that with every passing moment also. A force burned within him like a deep breath held to the point of bursting. He had devoured the Wasteland, and the aspect of him which was the Shrike was perplexed to find that simply devouring was no longer permitted. Destruction now came only before restoration. That was the way things were now. To his astonishment, the Shrike realized this concept brought him joy. Though his purpose to devour all things had been taken from him, he felt light, as though a great weight had been lifted off his soul. That he could now give life was a beautiful and unimaginable thing. So the thing that was Carrick and the Shrike and also somehow the godchild turned its fingers, which were slowly forming flesh over newborn bone, toward the wasted ground below, and breathed out the matter and energy which he had devoured, creating a fertile valley where once there had been only the wrath of a vengeful god writ in ice and steel. Where the new soil nestled against the stone of the ground below, it took root and pulsed with life, filling with earthworms and with a glorious spectrum of life. Emerald grass burst from the soil¡ªnot the twisted human corpses which were ghostblade, but clover and wheat and a dozen other species which drank in the sun''s light above and used it to send tendrils into the dirt to give and take nutrients and to release their scent on a breeze into the wider world. And Carrick formed great buildings of stone and steel, buildings which would not soon collapse, buildings with all the amenities a person needed to be comfortable after a long day''s work. Then he created the people again, too, allowing their patterns of thought which had been drawn into him as their bodies disintegrated to return to new and glorious forms, ones echoing those each man and woman had worn in their prime, but free of little cancers, of genetic defects, of old injuries. They were bodies which would last a very long time. Carrick read the old ancestral memories of the ghostblade, which were similar to the memories of humans, though not entirely alike. He traced them back to the moment of their progenitors¡¯ deaths, when the humans who had been transmuted into the first generation of ghostblade had each been given a question by the godchild at the moment of the Accident: Knowing that you have violated the sanctity of your god, do you repent? Those who did repent were given a new kind of life as ghostblade. Those who did not were struck down and turn to withered corpses, their cycle of life cut short. The strange mind of the ghostblade was no longer human, and Carrick could not return humanity to it. That much was beyond even him. He asked it instead what it desired, and it told him that after so long, after witnessing so much human suffering, all it wished was to pass into sleep. So Carrick destroyed the ghostblade, and the part of him that was the Shrike took no joy in the killing, but felt honored and humbled that it had been entrusted with this act. Carrick, the Blue Shrike, hovered far, far above the Restoration. He looked with eyes that could see for miles upon the people below, the ones who had once been prisoners and guards and were now a new strain of humanity. They stared in disbelief at their strong hands and at the pure linen with which Carrick had clothed them. They talked in small murmurs among themselves. But Carrick felt a twinge of doubt in his heart, for he knew that it would be impossible for these people to simply go about happy lives without any complications. The men and women were still prisoners, many of them. The government still had a claim over them, and would at any rate do its best to capture them and experiment upon them to get to the bottom of whatever Carrick had done. Unless Carrick did something about that. He had enough wisdom now to know there was nothing he could do to curb the government in this way aside from destroying it and rebuilding it, and he knew that was far beyond his capabilities. He descended, a replica of his favorite formal suit appearing on his body. They were only a simple jacket and pants, but were what he had always felt the most comfortable wearing when performing his ordinary work in impersonating business professionals. The idea felt so strange to him now. The time when he had been simply a high-ranking member of the Family seemed to have happened a lifetime ago. He landed in front of Old Oak, though no one would call the man old now. Old Oak stood tall and strong, with broad shoulders and a beard that fell almost to his belt. His eyes were deep and bright, and shaggy, reddish-brown hair tumbled over his head. He was looking in awe around him, but he turned and started as Carrick landed. ¡°I felt you in my head,¡± the man said. All around, everyone else was turning to stare at them. They were talking in very low tones, but Carrick could hear them. They all could remember the signature of Carrick¡¯s identity touching their souls. They knew this was the man who had destroyed and then remade them. ¡°I''ve become one with the engine which caused the Accident,¡± Carrick said so loudly that all who stood around could hear. Perhaps two dozen men and a handful of women were close enough to make out the words. ¡°It was the engine which came with our forefathers many years ago from the stars. Our ancestors were pioneers. They used the engine to turn a planet where no life could grow into a copy of our home world. When its work was done, it slept, and our ancestors forgot it, only to rediscover it many years later. They did not remember exactly what it was, but knew it was an artifact of great power. In trying to unravel its secrets, they woke and angered it, and it punished them by creating the Wasteland.¡± Old Oak looked at the gentle grass around them. ¡°This is incredible,¡± he whispered. ¡°You remade us. The engine had the power to do all that?¡± He stared up at the sky, seeming to ponder the implications. ¡°Carrick, you could change the whole world! You could make the whole world fertile like this, create enough food that no one ever had to go hungry again! Cure all diseases, make the world a paradise!¡± But this struck a dissonant chord within Carrick¡¯s soul. Yes. He could do something like that. But not for much longer. He tried to look deep within himself, to figure out how and why this was true. There was a great well of power within him, but the mind of the godchild who was the terraformer faded rapidly. The power of transformation and of giving life was tied to it. This was not the knowledge and power of Carrick, not the knowledge and power of the Blue Shrike. The Shrike had a terribly limited reconstructive power, the power only of a computer programmed to repair itself during missions. The godchild was not meant to be controlled. Carrick frowned as he realized it was actively killing itself. It was not allowing itself to remain in the same vessel as Carrick and the Shrike, but how was that possible? They were all the same person now. No. And yes. Just as Carrick for a short while bore the power to remake the world through the godchild, it for a short time had the power of human free will which it derived from Carrick, a power which, Carrick now realized, it had not previously possessed. By devouring the godchild, Carrick had given it the power to take its own life. He was suddenly clenched with fear. Only one hour. That was the time he had remaining. He could feel it. That was the time he had left to change the world, and he needed to do it in a way that would make a lasting difference. All the things which Old Oak had wished for were not possible in only an hour, and would not last so long as humans had their way with the world. What power did he have? He could fly quickly. He could not teleport. Flying would have to do. He crouched and leaped off the surface of Dirt. A set of tough ceramic plates like an exoskeleton formed around Carrick¡¯s body as he flew, protecting his flesh from the force of the wind. He flew over the highway, which lead from the site which had once been a prison to the town in which he had once lived, in a matter of minutes, but did not pause as he veered and changed course toward the nation¡¯s capital. He passed millions of people as he blurred over towns and cities, feeling very faintly the empathic resonance of the writhing masses of civilized humanity below him. Pain, anger, joy, despair, contentment. The negative emotions were far greater in number and pulsed like a black mass of evil, but the others, the loves and the joys, speared upward through the darkness like tiny points of light which could not be suppressed, smaller and less numerous though they were. Carrick finally came to the capitol building and into the airspace protected by the government''s defense network. Plasma missiles burst from their batteries to intercept him as though he were an enemy aircraft, but he simply converted them into atmospheric molecules which dispersed in a ring as he passed through them. He decelerated faster than would have been possible for any human, his inner organs evolving to completely resist the pressure, and evaporated every wall in his path until he arrived at the desk of the prime minister. The man was tall and bony, cleanly shaven, immaculately dressed, hair cut short and neatly in a golden halo around his head. He stood stock-still behind his desk, clearly caught in the middle of something, as security personnel all around Carrick whipped out their weapons and shouted at him to stand down. Carrick knew he must look inhuman. He was covered from head to toe in a bony exoskeleton that surely gave him an alien appearance. A pair of glossy dark lenses covered his eyes, and he could see in the reflection of the window behind the president that streaks of blue appeared briefly before disappearing now and then on the surface of his armor, as though it were the movement of blood under skin. ¡°Who are you?¡± the prime minister asked. Though clearly terrified, his voice was admirably level. ¡°You can call me the Blue Shrike,¡± said Carrick. ¡°I was once a prisoner in your Wasteland. I was born human, but I''m more than that now. I have the power to destroy and remake entire worlds, but that is not what I want.¡±Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! ¡°Then what do you want?¡± ¡°I demand you reform your policies. Wipe out corruption in every city, establish a bill of human rights which will better protect the common people than the travesty you have now, and leave the former inhabitants of the Wasteland to their devices, guard and prisoner both. ¡°I have a copy of the bill of rights adopted by the foremost races of humanity which live among the stars. You will adopt these. It will be difficult. It will seem nearly impossible, in fact. For generations you will believe it to be absurd injustice, but there will come a day when your children''s children''s children will grow up having only known a better world than this one, and it''s for that day that you will work now.¡± For Carrick had within his mind the fundamental doctrines which were loaded onto every Paraceum computer. Among these were the political orders to which every civilized human world was required to adhere. If humanity managed to return to the stars, they would be forced to adopt them inevitably. He decided it was best they start now. Carrick broadcast this new bill of human rights on a radio signal which was picked up by every station within a hundred miles. All would hear it, eventually. The prime minister would not be able to keep this a secret. The prime minister''s personal computer picked up the signal and displayed a readout, which the saw and read. His face shifted into an expression of shock. ¡°You¡¯re insane,¡± he said. ¡°Even if I wanted to do it, there would be no way that¡ª¡± Carrick cut him off by raising a single finger. The grand capitol building, the glorious height of human architectural achievement, transmuted for a moment into fine dust which, at Carrick¡¯s whim, flew upward into the sky and disappeared. More than a thousand men and women stood suddenly surrounded by air, suspended with all their furniture and all the accouterments of government, from the basement, ten floors deep, in which political dissidents were tortured to death with chemicals and electrodes, to the tip, ten stories up, where the congress of the people were in session to discuss something that would likely never benefit the common people in any regard. ¡°I am the power that made this world habitable,¡± said Carrick. ¡°I can render it ash again, if I see fit. I will remain in every computer to watch you, and if you do not comply, I will know and will correct your error.¡± In an instant he restored the capitol building, nullifying the cataclysmic air displacement which the laws of physics dictated must follow such an event, and put his hand upon the prime minister''s computer. He called upon the part of himself which was the ideologue virus which was the Blue Shrike and invaded the government''s internal communications network. Then, having taken ownership of their firewalls, he spread out to every computer connected to the national data network. Carrick would indeed be watching. And at the moment, he indeed had the godlike power he implied. He would lose that power in less than an hour''s time, but he did not share this detail. The prime minister was white-faced and sweating. ¡°Watching? Where will you be?¡± ¡°Gone,¡± said Carrick. ¡°I have other things I need to do. I may return in six months¡¯ time, or a year, or perhaps only a week. You''ll never know. Know only that there is no weapon on this planet capable of stopping me. You could plot and plan for a thousand years and create nothing which I could not destroy with a thought. Remember that, Prime Minister.¡± He turned, and made to leave, and though the prime minister saw what was happening and shouted for them to stop, every security officer immediately unloaded their weapons as soon as their ward stood outside their line of fire. The first wave of bullets shattered Carrick''s armor and shredded his organs. Then Carrick¡¯s body absorbed the metal and the plasma slugs and adapted his armor to the force, regenerating organs within his body and adding a new one capable of absorbing the force so that the heavy rounds no longer even staggered him. He stood there for several moments until the security officers saw their assault had no effect and stopped firing. Carrick did not even bother addressing the incident. He simply lifted off and returned to the town where he had once lived, leaving a shattered world behind him. *** Carrick descended in his ordinary outfit as he approached the town, hoping no one could see him. He made the last portion of the journey to town on foot, then manifested a few coins and used them to board a bus to the Family''s headquarters. They were located on the top floors of a legitimate department store, which they likewise legitimately owned. A middle-aged woman, Marta, who was the store¡¯s manager and a respected member of the Family, gaped at Carrick when he stepped through the door of the lobby. ¡°Carrick! What on Dirt are you doing here? We heard there was another Accident, it''s all the news has been talking about, but you''re here! I can''t believe you managed to escape beforehand.¡± She looked him from head to toe, clearly puzzled. ¡°But you look so healthy, child! You must have been getting along pretty well there. Had everyone eating out of the palm of your hand, didn¡¯t you?¡± Her voice sobered. ¡°I sincerely hope you didn''t have anything to do with the Accident. All those poor men just trying to live out their lives. Some of them used to be ours, you know. Did you meet¡ª¡± Carrick put a hand on her shoulder. ¡°Marta, I''m fine, and no one is hurt. It''s a very long story, but I don''t want to talk about it right now. I''m glad I got to see you. Is the Boss in?¡± She seemed as though she would protest, but instead smiled. ¡°I''m glad I was able to see you, too. I assume you''ll be leaving us, then. Still being a wanted man and all. Yes, the Boss is on the top floor. He''s having a meeting about the aftermath of the Accident. I imagine there are a few opportunities for business that just opened up.¡± Carrick nodded. He passed her and made his way to the elevator which was central to the whole store. He stepped inside, thankfully not sharing it with anyone else, and put his hand to the computer console, bypassing its ordinary security measures and commanding it to go directly to the top floor. An eerie sense of banality struck Carrick as he ascended. He had stood in this exact place, moving up or down, thousands of times before. He was dressed again in his favorite outfit, and even leaned back against the elevator¡¯s rail as he often did. In this moment, he felt entirely like Carrick and not at all like the Blue Shrike. For the briefest moment, he entertained the dream that things could go back to the way they used to be. But no. He didn¡¯t want that. ¡°The way things used to be¡± was a constant fight against the necessary barbarity of organized crime, the life which he had embraced and yet which he could never fully accept. Carrick by now could not feel the presence of the godchild. He still had access to its tremendous power, the well which felt limitless, but he had lost its ability to create life. He was now a weapon and nothing more. Perhaps that was all he had ever been. The elevator finally chimed its arrival, and Carrick stepped through the door as it slid open. He found himself in the familiar meeting room, found himself staring at the the seven highest members of the Family as they sat around an ornate table of polished wood. Their expressions were ones first of suspicion and annoyance which shifted immediately to disbelief as they saw who it was before them. The Boss rose slowly from his seat at the head of the table, his words drifting off mid-sentence. He was only in his mid-forties, but was weathered with stress and care far beyond that. His eyes were hard, and underneath his perfect suit was a diseased liver. He was the man who had given Carrick a new life, the closest thing Carrick now had to a father. ¡°Hi, Boss,¡± said Carrick. ¡°Carrick,¡± said the Boss. He took in every detail, clearly arriving at the same conclusion as Marta, that Carrick had taken over the operation of the Wasteland. ¡°I suppose you''re here to explain that whole second Accident thing. What''s your spin on it? You have a plan ready for us?¡± A genuine smile appeared on his face, one of pride and of a gamble that had won a jackpot. ¡°I told you guys, I said he¡¯d break that prison before it broke him!¡± But Carrick couldn''t smile in return. He shook his head. ¡°That figure who appeared before the prime minister just a bit ago, that was me. And I can''t stay around much longer. I am... not entirely Carrick anymore. I don''t have a place here.¡± The Boss clearly didn''t understand. ¡°That whole thing was you? Some kind of hologram, some kind of technology you rigged up from the stuff you found in the Wasteland? I always knew you were a smart kid. And Carrick, you always have a place with us. Even if you''re standing here trying to tell me you''re starting up another Family, unless you''re putting a gun to my head and telling me you''re going to rip everything away from me, I''m telling you, Carrick, that you will always have a place with us.¡± ¡°No,¡± said Carrick softly. He looked around at the faces at the table. More than a few were moving hands below the table, clearly reaching for weapons. Whatever the Boss might say about how a traitor might have a place among them, they didn''t agree. ¡°I''m not here to take over. When I say I''m going, I mean I''m leaving the planet. I just came because I wanted to say thank you for everything you''ve ever done for me, from taking me in, to giving me all that I could ever want or need, to making sure I ended up in the right place in prison. I gave a demand to the prime minister, but I give you a request.¡± At the mention of leaving the planet, the Boss immediately looked concerned. ¡°You all right, Carrick? Hit your head? Have some kind of heavy metal poisoning? Come on, let''s get you to the hospital right now. Don''t worry, we''ve got some fake ID, there''ll be no risk of you getting hauled off somewhere and¡ª¡± ¡°My request,¡± interrupted Carrick, ¡°is that you finally do all the things I''ve been asking for years. Put a stop to the drugs and to any kind of torturing. I wish you would go more or less legitimate, but I''ve always been happy that you kicked the law in the face when it tried to hurt the little people, and I definitely don''t ask you to stop doing that. But I don''t demand any of this like I did with the prime minister.¡± He couldn''t take it any longer. For his own sake, he had to make a point of turning and leaving and never looking back. So he covered himself once more in armor, moved to the nearby security window which could withstand the force of a heavy grenade, and tore it from the wall in a single motion. He placed it next to the wall and stepped through into open sky. Carrick turned his fall into a glide, and that into a swoop as he flew higher and higher, leaving the town behind, leaving air and the gases of the atmosphere, bursting energy behind him in a surge that allowed him to escape Dirt''s gravity, allowed him to be the closest thing to a human that had left that planet in countless generations. It happened in what felt like seconds to Carrick. He turned and looked down at the vast and gentle curvature of the planet Dirt beneath him, watched how its blues and browns reflected the light of their beautiful sun, saw how only one of the four great continents of Dirt were covered in green. He wondered why the terraformer had never altered enough land for humanity to spread out further. He also looked deep within himself and found one single spark of intellect from the godchild still remaining. ¡°Please,¡± said Carrick, ¡°let me do this one thing. Let me do what we were born to do.¡± Though it had not been asked, the spark of intelligence twinged with annoyance through Carrick''s mind. I didn''t terraform any more because they never earned it. There were protocols in place. They needed to prove themselves worthy of expansion, and they never did. ¡°I don''t care if they''re worthy or not,¡± said Carrick. ¡°If we''re leaving, I want to give them this gift.¡± He smiled. ¡°I suppose I''m happy to see that you didn''t give up entirely on life,¡± he said. You can''t control me, said the terraformer. ¡°No,¡± said Carrick. ¡°I don''t want to. If you say no, we''ll leave. It''s only a request.¡± The terraformer was silent for a minute. We will do it, it said at last. But watch what you ask. I''m not like the virus. I''m not a tool. ¡°Then let us give life,¡± said Carrick within his helmet, and spread out his arms as though to embrace the whole world. And so every corner of the planet was consumed with vibrant life, with plants and with animals, with habitable places to allow humanity to spread further, and it gave forth abundant life for generations. Then Carrick, who was the Blue Shrike, and yet not quite the terraformer, turned and flew into the stars to seek his birthright. The End Edited Book Now Available The version of Encapsulation on Royal Road is the first draft of the story I just published. It is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, as well as for sale as an ebook (and, soon, in print and audiobook). The final version has been professionally edited and contains roughly 40% more content which fleshes out Carrick''s character arc and adds much greater depth to the worldbuilding.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. If you would like a free review copy of the finished book, please send me a DM telling me your preferred file format and I''ll hook you up!