Daemon & Sunny: Prequel

{Author’s Note: KatLady requested more, more, more of “Daemon & Sunny”. Since she has been patiently camped outside my castle for three months, I have decided to post as much of this tale as I possibly can,t hough it is a WIP, a Work-In-Progress, and thus not complete. In order to post what I do have of the tale, we have to start at the beginning, which doesn’t have quite as much in the way of erotica as what’s online already in “Daemon & Sunny” and “Daemon & Sunny 2”, but there will be more to come, including chapters that follow the action after D&S 2! Here’s hoping all of you enjoy the tale! ~Lotm}

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CHAPTER ONE

Tarkat II

“Ow!”

Sunny frowned. She was in the middle of a difficult, only partially legible translation, pouring over a shard of etched metal. Her employers, Saunders & Saunders Archaeology For Hire, would not like it if Sundrea Dannonee messed up this very important translation—and the sooner she got this job over, the sooner she could move on to another job. Because it seemed as if lately, the artifacts and sites they were investigating were getting less and less respectable; Sunny needed to be respectable, to earn a coveted, tenured Assistant Historian’s post at an Imperial University. She needed to concentrate. She didn’t need the sounds of zapping and another pained,

“Ow—dammit!”

The dig boss and chief archaeologist, Roster, scowled and strode over to the section of tent-covered jungle the sounds were issuing from, stopping just a foot or so from vanishing behind a clump of the wide-bladed Tarkatan grass that hid the cause of those sounds. “What thecraker are you doing, Saumwe? Stop soddering off and get back to work!”

“I’mtrying! I uncovered a battered old box here…but Ican’tpick it up! It keepszappingme!”

Sunny, bemused by the thought of a forty or so year old crash site having a box with a still-energized security field, didn’t see the stiffening of the dig boss. She bent her head back to the scrap of metal she was decoding, scripted in ancient Imperial. The most intriguing find, considering most of the rest of the remnants of the old crash were pieces of far more modern value. Some artworks that were as much as a couple centuries old, but this one piece of metal was etched with snippets of a language used commonly two thousand years ago, and only on the most formal Imperial occasions now.

“If the damned box is giving you trouble, leave it alone. Go work in grid B-17! Go on!”

Saumwe came out grumbling but careful to keep his dirty looks aimed away from the dig boss. Roster was known for his temper over botched work. At the artifact table, set up at the sealed edge between the dig tent and their living quarters, Sunny painstakingly decided the word she was working on wasdu’uhre, notdu’ubre. Because to have written ‘…the one shallsquallthe other…’ made no grammatical sense. She should know, too. Ancient Imperial was her speciality—the reason why Saunders & Saunders had hired her, actually. Everything from the dialects spoken by the commoners, to the diadems worn by the royal family, and the meanings and inflections of each. The stately grace, the common sense wisdom—the Ancient Imperium fascinated her.

Had there been an Emperor and Empress on the throne currently, she just might have been able to apply for a job as Historian to the Imperium—even maybe the most coveted post she could think of, Customs Keeper, though that was just a fantasy. The Astral Imperium was the oldest stellar empire in existence, even if there was only a Regent on the throne, the aging grandson of the last rightful rulers, who had died forty-two years before. The Imperium was still going, but it needed a new Emperor and Empress, and the powers they wielded, to refresh its spirit and restore it to its glory. That glory was slipping, fragmenting back into the original world-kingdoms that had been forged together to form the Imperium.

Everyone knew roughly how the Emperors and Empresses were chosen: everyone knew that the Matrix chose and created them. Deep in the distant past, a man and a woman of some long-forgotten world had either uncovered an alien artifact, or had created an artifact on their own, no one knew, that had given them Ultimate Power…the power to assert their will on the natural order of the universe and alter it as they willed. It had been a good thing that the Matrix had chosen two inherently good people, who had intervened in an interstellar war and bound the warring worlds into a united whole. The Matrix had then passed, not from parents to children, but to another couple, who had held that alliance together and added more worlds and another chosen pair added more, until the Pax Imperium coalesced out of the alliances, and the Matrix-chosen pair at that time were declared Emperor and Empress, and given the right to rule over the Peace of the Imperium. The Matrix always chose good-hearted, wise people. Sometimes it had taken a few years for the Matrix to choose, between the deaths of the previous rulers and the revelation of the new…but not until this last Interim, as they were called, had the wait lasted so long.

There was talk now of making the post of Emperor hereditary, of crowning the Regent’s son when the Regent got around to dying. Sunny thought that would be a serious pity, because a hereditary ruler, as history so often proved among the smaller, king and queen ruled stellar empires within and without the Imperium, did not always make a good ruler. It wasn’t her choice though; she was a historian, an anthropologist of the past, not a politician or ruler of the present or its future. She marshalled her concentration, and worked on the next few words. It took her another hour, even with the use of her topographical scanner and the use of her portable comp’s resolution re-creation programs, to puzzle out the next few.

‘…reeur saubets du’uhre mukrah, yo’se mukrah…’

‘…the one chooses the other, and the other…’

Sunny frowned.Now why does that sound familiar? She sat back in her camp chair, the permacanvas creaking softly, and blotted at the sweat beading on her freckle-dotted forehead. The tent was stifling, but at least it and the repeller post, glowing in the center of the tent, kept the bugs away. The big bugs, on this hot jungle world. She let her mind wander, to let the familiarity of the phrasing surface on its own in her mind, barely hearing the muttering from beyond the wide-bladed, ten-foot-tall grass clumped not far away. She knew Roster and the younger Mr. Saunders, the employer of this particular mission, would ignore her, because when she was deep in her work, they knew that she ignored them.

Still, their hissed conversation distracted her.

“…yousure?”

“It has to be. Only the—onlyit could have a powersource capable of surviving so long—the box is too small to have a energy source capable of lasting this long, not without being practically all battery. That and we can’t touch it. It’s said thatit cannot be touched by any other.”

“Yes, but would that apply to the box it’s kept in?” Saunders argued back. “Craker! We don’t even know if it’s kept in a box, between!”

Cannot be touched by any other…Her mind, picking up that stray bit even as she worked on puzzling out her real task, clicked. A line of antiquity snapped into view in her mind.

“That which Cannot

And that which Can Be,

Touched if by Thou

And Made if by Thee,

The One Chooses the Other,

And the Other Chooses the One,

What cannot be Touched or be Made—

Can always be Done or Undone.”

It was the Riddle of the Matrix. Sunny’s sharply intelligent mind suddenly knew what they were looking for. Why they were looking for it in a half-buried jungle wreck roughly forty years old. Why she felt uneasy about her current task, employed with Saunders & Saunders.

She heard them shifting, Roster and Saunders, and quickly leaned forward, instinctively resuming her usual posture of elbows on the table, the shard of metal in her hand, altering her face to the one that she had when she was deep in thought about something…instead of the startled one she knew it had metamorphosed into for a few moments.

“Sunny. Sunny.Sunny!”

She jumped and blinked, looking up at them as if indeed startled out of deep thought. “Sorry—you wanted something, Dr. Roster? Mr. Saunders,” she added with a quick, polite nod. The middle-aged man looked less trustworthy than his older brother, the other half of their partnership. She held up the shard as they exchanged a quick look. “You know, it would help if the dig workers could find more shards like this one. I don’t have enough to work with to place this one small piece in any larger context accurately.”

Mr. Saunders smiled indulgently down at her, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He glanced over at his archaeologist dig-boss. “You told me she was rather single-minded at times.”

Sunny managed a gamine grin. “You should’ve heard my mother calling me to supper. She wouldn’t even bother to call my name, but would call one of my friends, andthey’dget my attention more directly. Did you want something?”

“Mr. Saunders has graciously given everyone the rest of the day off,” Roster informed her.

“It’s too hot to work any longer,” Saunders said smoothly, though the day was no hotter than any of the others they’d spent here in the past three weeks. “I figured we could all use a small break, refresh the braincells, that sort of thing.”

They want to get me out of the dig tent, so they can figure out what to do with the ‘zapping box’ Saumwe uncovered. She’d cultivated her ‘oblivious attention’ in order to give her an excuse to avoid the coarser company of the archaeology assistants working the dig—she wasn’t nearly as absentminded as the impression she’d given these people to avoid having to deal overly much with them. She was hard-working, enthusiastic and meticulous when she wanted to be, and she’d let those traits show through, because those helped keep her paycheck going. She showed some of that now with a brief nod. “That’d be very nice—thank you, Mr. Saunders. I’ll be right in, as soon as I’ve tagged and boxed the rest of these.”

“Go ahead and leave them here,” Roster suggested.

Sunny shook her head, glad shehad given the impression of being methodical. “You’d yell at me if I did that, and something happened. Don’t worry—it won’t take me more than fifteen, twenty minutes. I’m too interested in having a half-day to let my mind wander back to work,” she added on a joke, and turned her attention back to the younger objects spread out around her, dismissing them with a friendly wave and her customary reassural. “Everything’s in good hands!”

They stayed a few moments, then turned and crossed the section seal between the covering of the dig tent and the entirely enclosed, somewhat cramped quarters the dozen members of the archaeological team lived in. Her fingers flew over the keyboard of her comp pad as she logged in tagging numbers on the artifacts and double-checked their tagging codes with the electronic grid designations dissecting the dig grounds, and the lockable storage crates they were packed and secured in each time the dig’s workday was over with. As the dig researcher, she had to have access to the artifacts placed into the crates, so her thumbprint was in the crate scanners along with Dr. Roster’s and Mr. Saunders.

She wished there could be some sort of diversion as she worked, because she knew Saunders and Roster were most likely watching her on the dig’s security scanners, and they wouldn’t be happy about her wandering over to grid A-5 in her excited curiosity. To find the missing Matrix! Whoever brought it back to Impera and the High City, the great palace complex at the heart of the Imperium, would be showered with galactic-sized attention, great favors…could select at will her next position! She wouldn’t just be an Assistant Historian, she might even be able to swing Customs Keeper—

What are you thinking? Sunny chided herself as she put a two hundred year old, gold-leafed statuette into its slot in the packing crate, wrapped in foldfoam for protection.You wanted to get your next position on your own merits. Going, ‘oh, gee, um, here’s the Matrix,’ isn’t going to do that for you. That’d be almost like stealing anyway, because you know Saunders is looking for the Matrix himself.

…Though I do have the gut feeling he’s looking for it so he can sell it to the highest bidder. There are some people who’d pay the price of a small world to be able to get their hands on it, and experiment to see if the Matrix could be forced to grant them the power of Emperor-godhood.

She was wrapping the last item, the scrap of metal etched with a piece of the Matrix Riddle, when she heard it. It took her a couple seconds to identify the sound, but she heard it several times. And froze as she recognized it belatedly.

Blaster fire. From the other side of the dividing plexene wall.Dig pirates. They’d fought off a similar attack just a week ago; a group of ‘antiquities dealers’ that had been interested in acquiring whatever someone else had gone to all the trouble to dig up, so that the pirates themselves didn’t have to expend the effort. Her heart skipped a beat, jumping straight into doubletime. Her first thought was for the Matrix. If they find it, it will fall into the wrong hands—

Since the nearest cover to hide her from the door in the wall was the clump of grass hiding that particular grid, she dashed around it. Just in time, too. No sooner had she dived behind it, dropping to her knees in the turned-over dirt next to the pit Saumwe had been working on, then she heard one of the energized blasts rip through the plexene wall and smash into the table. Peering wide-eyed through the broad leaves, she looked at the scorched semicircle that used to be her comp, scanner, and half the table, and quickly removed her hand, hiding. She heard more blasterfire, then silence as she turned around, facing the other way. The nearest sensor stake was dark, telling her that the security and positioning system the stakes were linked into had been damaged or destroyed. Which meant none of the pirates likely knew she was back here.

Sunny had a few moments before she was discovered. Breathing hard, trying to breathe quietly, she peered into the pit of earth that had been exposed and brushed away. A plain, pewter-colored box, made of the easily electrifiable mineral puterium and indeed battered and scuffed, lay at an angle, its sides exposed but not loosened at its base. Aware that it had zapped the dark-skinned Saumwe, Sunny reached out to touch it anyway. The appearance of the tin, not even half the size of a human head, was a disappointment—it looked too plain and battered to be anything of value, when most of these puterium ‘keepsake’ boxes were scrolled and jeweled and highly decorated.But Saumwe was shocked by it, so there must be something valuable about it…

Gingerly, she brushed her fingers against the metal. And froze in shock…because shehadn’tbeen shocked by it. It had to be the box Saumwe, Roster and Saunders had referred to, because there wasn’t another object in the pit here in grid A-5. Curious, confused, Sunny brought both hands to the box, searching with her fingertips for the edge of the lid, a release catch of some kind. She found one down by the dirt, proving the box had impacted upside down during the crash that had formed this dig. Prying it carefully free—she wasn’t an archaeologist, but she’d taken enough courses in similar studies to know how to handle an artifact properly—Sunny righted it gently, setting it down in front of her, the pirate attack all but forgotten.

Picking up the dirt brush Saumwe had discarded, she brushed at the dirt on the top of the lid. An image appeared, one that made her suck in a sharp, awed breath. The double-twined ouroboros. Symbol of the Emperor and Empress, sigil of the Imperium—itwas a cremation box! The Emperor and Empressalwaysdied together, of old age…and their bodies always instantly deteriorated into white ash, as if seared in a fire so hot, not even the normal snips and pieces of remains were left behind. That ash was then placed into a box marked with two tail-devouring, serpentine dragons, one in white, the other in black, each other’s tails in their mouths, bodies looped and entwined to form an intimate circle on a grey background. The dragons were cracked, since the lid was deeply dented, even torn in its center, a chunk of metal missing, revealing the inner lid under the black and white onyx of the inlay. A missing piece that looked like it might have been the scrap she’d been examining so intently.

Even as she touched the inlaid, cracked stone, ran her fingers over the subtle scales carved into the mineral, something stung up into her hand. She jerked it away reflexively…and stared as the lid parted and rose…on its own. A glistening, glimmering, pulsing white light spilled free, its beams finding and striking her knees, her torso and arms, all the way up her braided hair to her freckled face, shining on her.

For a moment, Sundrea Dannonee stared into the heart of bright Eternity. An instant, that was all, but it was an eternal instant.

She was staring at the upside-down, untouched, battered, dull-grey box wedged in the dirt when the pirates, much better armed this time, found her. They prodded her unresisting body up, sealed a slave collar ribbon around her throat, and argued among themselves as to whether or not to rape her for themselves, or sell her. A scan of her body showed her healthy, intact, and most important, a virgin. Judged passably pretty, though not of the first quality, especially not with the vacant expression on her face, they decided to sell her as a sex slave, and sell most of the others that had survived the attack as labor slaves. While Roster, Saunders and the others were forced to unlock the sealed crates and gather up all the valuable, sellable items for the pirates, their leader took her back to their landing shuttle and locked her unresisting, dazed body into one of the jump seats.

Tovedd

She came back to full awareness in a shipboard cell with one of the other three women that had been working with her at the dig. Monrica, a seventeen year old pre-college student, had apparently been judged pretty enough to be kept ‘pristine’ along with Sunny, though her good looks were spoiled by her weeping-reddened eyes, and she was definitely not a virgin. She talked desultorily with Sunny, lapsing into long stretches of despairing unresponsiveness that explained why the girl hadn’t thought it strange Sunny hadn’t spoken or reacted other than automatically for a full day.

Sunny spent most of the next two days keeping herself silent company—which was better company than Monrica, who couldn’t enter into a conversation without bewailing her enslaved status and start crying again. Sunny spent half of her time pacing the small cabin with its bare-minimum comforts of bunkbeds, blankets, food dispenser and facilities tucked into the corner. She spent most of her time, whether sitting, lying down or pacing, entirely in thinking.

Shehad seen something within the box. But she couldn’t remember what. She remembered turning it over—she remembered thinking about the scrap she’d deciphered matching a torn out piece in the middle of a…in the middle of a… In the middle of the uprighted lid, at the least. But she had been vaguely aware of her surroundings, and had remembered seeing the uninspiring underside of the box, back upside down again, the dirt around it undisturbed, when the pirates had found her.