Before The Storm (Ch. 06)

Chapter Six

Sketch paced around the room like a caged animal, stalking from one side of the chamber to the other without stopping to catch his breath or even pause to think. He was arguing with a voice in his head, which was the very definition of insanity, and yet, he was certain that it wasn't just a voice inside his mind, but maybe an echo of a long gone Fury.

Will you quit panicking if I tell you that I'm alive and that you haven't damaged your brain?

'That all depends on whether or not you're lying to me,' Sketch thought at the voice that continued to ping pong inside of his skull. 'If you truly are Fury Rose, you would know what she called me, wouldn't you?'

You mean how I called you Crawler when I thought you dragging your feet? I meant it affectionately, as a way to spur you into faster activity. You were a very talented pupil, but you did have a tendency to complain about putting in the work needed to improve your skills.

'No, I had a tendency to want to understand the benefits of the things you were making me do, Rose, if you are, in fact Rose.'

You asked me to prove that I remembered you in your youth. I just did.

'Except if you're a figment of my splintered mind, you would've had access to that knowledge.'

Then there's no possible way for me to prove to you that I'm not just a figment of your brain.

'You could finish the joke.'

The joke?

'The last time we saw each other, you told me the start of a joke, but didn't finish it...'

Ha! The joke! Oh gods, I'd forgotten I'd started telling you that before you left for your mission.

'If you're not a hallucination, you'll know the end of that joke!'

It's not really that funny, but sure, I can tell it. Guy sitting at this bar says "Hey, lemme tell you a story." Guy sitting next to him says "Sure." First guy says "So Fury Kage, Fury Rizinol and Fury Osthen walk into a bar, and suddenly these sirens start going off inside of the bar, going all WHEE-WOO, WHEE-WOO."

'Sure, I remember that part. Now finish the joke!'

The second guy turns to the first guy and says "Wow, that's quite a story. What's it mean?" And the first guy says "Nothing." So, the second guy says, "Donny, you're an idiot."

Sketch paused for a moment, his face scrunching up into a frown. 'I've been scratching my head about this for decades, and it's just a shitty Shakespeare joke?'

I said it wasn't really that funny. I used to tell Storms half of jokes before we sent them on slightly dicey missions, so they would always fight a little harder to get back home. Usually worked too. So what happened to you, Storm Walker, and why did you dig up my Ashaka?

He stopped for a long second. 'You're... you're actually aware that you're dead?'

Dead is a very relative term, but I will concede I no longer have a corporeal form.

'How in any way is that not dead?'

My mind is still evolving. It can still take on new memories, and I can still influence the world outside of the Ashaka I now find myself sharing.

'Sharing?'

Mmmm. You could ask me questions all day and you would learn much and I would learn very little, so let us take turns at this. How long have I been dead?

'A bit more than half a century? I don't have all the details, but you were gravely wounded in attempting to escape when the Y'bari were ordered to wipe out all the members of The Calm. Your body was laid to rest on Jamolti.'

And how is it you have barely aged at all?

'Ah ah, you ask one, I ask one.'

You asked half a dozen before we started, so indulge an old woman at least one more before we begin even exchange.

'Fair. I was in long term hibernation, being managed by an alien AI that seemed to find some way to counter long-term freezer burn. The ship was trapped, and the AI couldn't manage to get the ship out, but was able to keep me from wasting away until another random collision caused the ship to be shaken loose of its prison. When I returned to the world, I found humanity had been conquered, The Calm had been mostly eliminated and everyone I'd ever known was long since dead.'

And yet, you did not simply lay down and give up.

'You knew me at least a little, Fury Rose. Does that sound like me?'

It doesn't, but I won't hold that as your question. Ask your next.

'You said you were sharing the Ashaka. What did you mean by that?'

Perhaps you heard the rumor that I was cursed. I never let that rumor be squashed, simply because I enjoyed the sort of... mystique that it gave me. It's nice to be given a bit of a unique status, so while the rest of the Furies knew that it wasn't true, until I had a better handle on why my Ashaka functioned so fundamentally differently than all the other Ashakas that The Calm had seen over the centuries. I came to realize that it was because I was a legacy, a member of the order whose Ashaka had been passed down from generation to generation. The Ashaka you have in your hand belonged to my father, and to his aunt before him, and her father before her. Typically each Spark builds their own Ashaka, but our family has kept one Ashaka and it has been kept in our family. Each of us made a point to use it at least one day a week. My father said he felt like it gave him guidance of our ancestors.

For me, that became a great deal more literal. I had to make a few modifications to the Ashaka when I inherited it, because it had been lightly damaged by my father's passing. I needed to repair it, and in doing so, I accidentally discovered something far more unusual about the Ashaka, something which I informed the Furies about while I continued to study it all my life. How much did you study your Ashaka when you created it, Storm Walker?

'Some? I wanted to know how it worked, and so I learned as much as I could about all the various pieces and parts, but some of the specific signal physics involving the crystals and harmonics always eluded me, no matter how much I worked to grasp their function.'

You are not alone in that confusion. Even most of the Furies, with all their accumulated wisdom, didn't fully understand how the crystal matrixes at the heart of each Ashaka completely functioned, only that they did. Our lack of understanding on how the Ashaka does what it does is what has led us to here, where we find ourselves now.

Good lord, Daughter, can you let someone else talk for once? a second voice said inside of his head. I am amazed our new host has let you carry on as long as you have without coming to the point. You must have acquired such evasiveness from your mother's side of the family.

Father, let me talk.

'Father?'

Yes. Let me try to sum up into short bits of information first which we can delve deeper into later. When a member of The Calm uses an Ashaka, it takes an imprint of the user's entire mind, more than a phantom or an echo, it's a complete copy of the user's memories and thoughts. In nearly every sense of the word, it makes a backup of the person, not that anyone in The Calm knew that, until my tweaks to my family's legacy Ashaka tapped into those backups. All four of us reside within this Ashaka now. Myself, Fury Muriel Rose; my father, Fury Horatio Rose; his aunt, Fury Dorothea Lily; and, finally, her father, Fury Kenji Lily.

'So... are you alive or dead?'

Our bodies are long since dust, but our consciousnesses live on, so who is to say whether we are dead, alive, or somewhere in between. I think. I feel. I dream. What more does it take to make me real?

'This... isn't the kind of experience I expected to have using someone else's Ashaka.'

Well, we're with you, lad. From start to finish. How dwindled are The Calm?

'All but extinct. I might be the only living practitioner, although I suppose it's entirely possible that there are others, just in hiding.'

Let's hope. I do not relish the idea that you could be all that remains of our great order. That isn't meant as a slight to you as much as it is a feeling of sadness that all the history and tradition of The Calm could be lost.

Perhaps we can train this one up into being a Fury and he could take on pupils, restart the order once more.

I believe The Calm would still be hunted even in these days, father.

Is that true, lad?

'I don't know, but it certainly seems likely. '

Harumph. Well. Keep the thought in the back of your mind.

'Yes sir.'

"Sketch?" Helen's voice said to him, stirring him from the internal conversation raging inside of his head. "You seem to be quite focused on something, but I can't seem to discern quite what."

Sketch chuckled a little bit. "I'll tell you all about it later, Helen. Did either of the ladies decide to go down to Veline?"

"Negative, Captain. They wanted to await your all clear, and, more importantly, they wanted to go down to the planet with you."

"Well then, let's get dirtside," Sketch said, tucking the Ashaka into the inside pocket of his jacket as he headed for the bridge.

"You feeling more like yourself, Sketch?" Serena asked him when he arrived. "I certainly don't feel the intense need to claw your clothes off you right now, so I'm taking that as progress."

"I've got a working Ashaka again, so I can keep all my skills in check," he replied. "That's something I haven't had in several years, so I've asked Helen to take us down to the surface of Veline. They only have a handful of actual cities; I told her pick the largest one and to find us the most popular bar she could see, one with loads of people and a decently cranked soundtrack."

"Am I going to be allowed off the ship as well, Captain?" Aliara asked. The Y'bari had clearly decided that she planned on seeing the city with them. During the time he'd spent working on the Ashaka, she'd obviously had Helen perform the cosmetic surgery she'd detailed to him earlier, to make her look like a P'Nox, a tiny metal barbell in the flesh between her eyes at the bridge of her nose, and a handful of black stripe tattoos along her face. He was surprised how much it changed the general look of her, and he could understand why the P'Nox and the Y'bari, despite being genetically identical, were rarely confused for one another.

Sketch bristled a little at being called Captain, but decided it was his ship, so he was just going to have to get used to people other than Helen calling him that. "I don't see any reason why you wouldn't, Aliara. Oh, should I start calling you something else instead, if you're pretending to be P'Nox?"

Aliara smiled softly. "I'm not pretending, Captain. For all intents and purposes, I am P'Nox now. I no longer serve the Starless Dominion; my alliance is to The Praeteritus and her crew, now and forever. As such, I need not change my name. It's a common enough name among both the Y'bari and the P'Nox that it will not draw any suspicion."

The Praeteritus was designed that it could dock in any major spaceport, but for the first couple of minutes as they descended onto a city called Skrum, Sketch wasn't entirely sure they would qualify. But as they closed in, he could see they weren't anywhere near as tiny as he had thought, mostly because it seemed the city ran downward instead of out, one giant column-shaped hole that descended far down beneath the surface of the planet, which made sense, considering the harsh winds that continually ripped across it.

Sketch moved to sit at the pilot's station and guided the ship down and into its docking bay, where he let Helen and the station's auto-docker software get The Praeteritus where it needed to be, the comms channel popping up.

"Hey hey Praeteritus, Skrum Dock Central here," a voice said, apparently too busy to make visual confirmation. "Purpose of your visit?"

"Just need to get some solid beneath our feet for a few hours before heading back into the black for another long ride," Sketch said, falling back comfortably into his space trucker persona. "Wouldn't mind getting a charge, some vapor, some water and if you've got anybody who's selling heavy slugs, I need to refill a couple of empty racks. Cowboys seem to think they can start raiding mail carriers lately, so I've had to introduce a couple of them to my discouragement policy lately."

The voice on the other side laughed casually. "Yeah, we can hook you up with all of that for about the standard rates, although the water'll have a twenty percent markup, simply because we haven't got as much to go around here. That good, or you want to pass on the water?"

"Ah, just fill it all and I'll pay for it," Sketch replied. "Not entirely sure when I'll be back by civilization anytime soon."

"You aren't by it any time now, Praeteritus, but you're kind to imply that you might be. Anyway, take your siesta dirtside, and when you're ready to dust off again, we'll settle up tabs."

"You're a peach, Central. Praeteritus out." He flicked two fingers in and then heard the accompanying click of the signal turning off. "Helen, you know the drill. Let them into the common bay, and the ammo storage chamber, but keep them locked off from the rest of the ship, and sure as hell don't let them into the hangar bay with The Barrow. The last thing we need is anyone getting spooked off by seeing we're hauling a Y'bari battle dart with us."

"Aye aye, Captain."

"Shall we ladies?"

They headed off the ship and into Skrum, which seemed like it was somewhere between a mining colony, a trading outpost, and a manufacturing hub. There weren't a lot of people out and about, as it seemed like the workday was still in full swing, or maybe it was just how the shifts were laid out. Mining towns were hard to predict at first; they had their own natural rhythms and their start/stops were often at unusual hours. The streets were barren concrete, nothing all that refined, except for the main drag, which looked like it was steel plates, designed to handle heavy machinery relaying between the mine shaft.

They found there was one large tavern that couldn't be missed with a giant neon sign of a cowboy astride a jetcycle, a large blaster rifle strapped to his back, pistols on either side of his waist, but his cowboy hat had a headlamp on it. It was such a wild combination of gunfighter, prospector and performance star. The bar's name was "Open a Vein!"

When the three of them walked inside, suddenly the atmosphere changed. While outside was mostly filled with the sounds of heavy machinery off in the distance, inside, there was nothing but mad music, electric guitars and steel drums playing at a breakneck tempo. There was a funky bassline weaving beneath the sound of it, and there was a man in a banana hammock and leather boots dancing on one end of the bar and a woman in a bikini and miner boots dancing on the other end.

Sketch had been prepared for nobody to be in the place, and instead it was packed, with most of the tables completely full of miners, many of whom looked like they were blitzed, singing along to a song that Sketch didn't recognize at all.

It was strange to go from being unable to be around people to suddenly being a massive crowd. He hadn't expected to dive headfirst into masses of people. He had grown a little accustomed to being completely alone, and now that he was surrounded by living bodies in all directions, it was massively overwhelming. His vision flickered a little, like the walls were closing in around him, like he was being suffocated.

It wasn't just the sound of them either. All his senses were working overtime. He could smell the odors - machine oil, human sweat, barbeque sauce, old leather and caked on perfume. He could feel the vibrations from the throbbing bassline that rippled through his muscles like a rhythmic earthquake that flowed across and over him. He could taste copper and dust and cleaning products, that lingering hairspray that hadn't quite faded from the air. He could hear the sounds of coins jingling in people's pockets, of gaudy earrings designed to draw attention to themselves working overtime and the constant pouring of drinks from over at the bar, not to mention the constant THUMPTHUMPTHUMP of each of the dancers on top of the ends of the bar.

Together, it was both overwhelming and awe inspiring, terrifying and glorious, a cacophony of life and motion and sound, all at once. He'd spent many a night crossing the infinite black of space with jazz music cranked as loudly as he could, so that it didn't feel so empty and lonely, but after a while, he'd internalized all the rhythms of his music, and it didn't provide the shock to his system that it once did. But now he was surrounded by living people, all heading in different directions, doing different things, dozens of conversations happening in the same room, each group having to yell from time to time so they could rise above all the noise of the others around them.

He both wanted to flee in mental exhaustion and never leave.

"You okay, Sketch?" Serena said as she nudged him, stretching her toes to let her whisper into his ear. "You're staring a bit."

"It's been most of a decade since I was in a room with more than a couple of people, Serena," he said, finally exhaling a breath. "It's a bit to take in."

"Let's go get a table."

The three of them moved into the bar, and while they couldn't immediately spot any open tables, a booth in the corner seemed to be in the process of losing its inhabitants, as the people sitting there were tossing coins on top of a bar tab. Sketch was glad to get a quick glance at it, as it told him they were using the Dominion's standard Xime currency, and not some strange local money they would need to pick up. Most of the mining worlds ran on Dominion currency, but every so often, he would find one that would make it difficult for him when he stopped in to pick up supplies.

When the miners slipped out of the booth, the three of them moved in so they could take the space, as a server wandered over, scooping up the money and the bill from the table before opening a new one from them. "What can I get you folks?"

"Something with a lot of rum in it," Sketch said.

"Brandy," Serena added.

"Martini," Aliara said. "And if we could get one of those bowls of pretzels, that would be excellent."

"Sure 'nuff, darlin'," the server said, strolling away from them slowly.

"You used to places like this?" Serena asked him.

"Used to be," he said with a soft sigh of relief. "Before I was... before I joined the Order." He had paused to reconsider speaking the phrase "The Calm" out loud. "Before I joined the Order, I spent a lot of time in bars on planets all across the black. I was drifting from conflict to conflict, one warzone after another, with brief periods of time spent at outposts, mining colonies, farming settlements and waystations between here and there."

"Was that a lonely life, a soldier of fortune, back before the Dominion quelled most of the wars?"

"They didn't quell the wars," Aliara corrected. "You humans simply hear less and less about them now, because we toned down your ability to hear about them."

"It wasn't all that lonely," Sketch said. "Simply because we were always in motion, and the times spent in bars, at taverns, at whorehouses... all of that was just waiting for the next thing, and the next thing was always just around the corner."

A couple of giant hulking monsters of men came stomping over towards the table. They were walls of muscle held together within canvas clothes that had clearly seen more than a few years of work without repair or change. They were brutes, used to getting whatever they wanted around the mines, able to pick and take whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted.