It all came back to Saketa as she slept, when she was helpless to consciously push it away. The events weren’t always in proper order, there were gaps in the plot, and people and locations were often in the wrong place. But the core elements always remained. The invasion. The orbital bombardment. The desperate, frantic fighting. Destruction and death. And finally, that impossible, horrible sound of a snapping blade.
It would be nice if it had the decency to end at that moment, but dreams were more swirling cloud than straight path, and as the alarm woke her up Saketa couldn’t tell if she’d been at any particular place in the narrative. But out of all the wounds that followed her into the waking world it was the snap that echoed in her soul. That had been the punctuation mark, ending one period and leaving her in a new one.
She sat up carefully. The pipe she’d decided to sleep on was wide enough to have a relatively flat surface, but balance was a slow riser.
That had been the approach alarm. This big, bulky transport ship would be touching down in an hour. So it was time for the morning routine.
Saketa wriggled fully out of her thermal sleeping bag and spent some time folding it tightly enough to fit into her little travelling sack. Next she felt around for the canteen in the near-darkness of her cramped surroundings. She found it on the gauge, or whatever appendage it was, that she’d hung it on before lying down, and drank greedily.
Her bladder needed emptying, and would only get more insistent now, but with the shipboard situation being what it was she was willing to let it wait. The din of people made it up to this little hiding place she’d found for herself, not in the form of words but simply as a general mush of fatigue and strained nerves.
Habit made her reach for the sword belt, and she stopped and groaned at herself. She was still doing this, almost every morning. She was still pretending she had her old blade to focus with. She did pick the replacement up, one hand around the scabbard, the other around the handle. She felt rather like a child obstinately picking at a wound out of some self-destructive impulse, and her fingers clenched tightly around the cold, dead thing in their grip. There was no help to be had from it. No focus. It was just a plain piece of metal, and a rather cheap one at that.
Still, she crossed her legs and draped the thing across her lap. Perhaps going through the familiar motions would help. It never had so far, but it was worth a try.
Saketa closed her eyes, shutting out what little light the surrounding machinery gave off, and began the breathing routine. That at least was as simple as ever. Quite literally as easy as breathing. Her body relaxed bit by bit, but as was so common lately she had to hunt down lingering tensions in her shoulders, in her brow, and in other small places where her inner self sought to manifest in physical action.
She looked inside, and that of course was when things started to go really wrong. The darkness was there waiting for her, as harsh and merciless as ever. She sought peace, balance, between the glow and the shadow; understanding of the latter so she could safely bask in the former. But her spirit was weighted down. That metallic snapping would not leave it, and she simply could not summon the energy to resist the weight in any meaningful way.
The failure, yet again, made her angry, and in turn she was further angered with herself for getting angry. Thus it all snowballed, in a routine as familiar as the breathing, until she forcibly ejected herself from the attempted mediation.
Failure.
The word haunted the corners of her mind, as subtle but undeniable as a chilly gust of wind. Or perhaps a drop, falling in the exact same spot as thousands before it.
Saketa angrily distracted herself by moving her meagre possessions further away on top of the pipe, then launched into a quick exercise routine. That she could at least still do properly. Her body was as wire-tight and sharpened as it had ever been, and she sought to keep it that way with a series of pushes, stretches and poses that pitted her own body weight against her muscles.
She didn’t have time to do a full one, but had gotten a bit of a burn going by the time another alarm sounded. They were about to hit the planet’s gravity well, and docking would come soon after.
Saketa straddled the pipe, allowed herself to hang her head for a moment and sigh, then went through her possessions. Her bag contained spare underwear, basic hygiene supplies and a bit of money. She’d fallen asleep in her leggings, so next she slipped into a mesh shirt, pulled her boots on, and strapped on the sword belt. The big knife that accompanied the sword always needed a bit of adjustment to not get in the way, and she made yet another mental note of having its sheath looked at. Finally she slung the bag across her torso and wriggled into a plain brown coat.
She ran her hands upwards over her face and into her short bob, which she gripped for a couple of seconds.
Time to face the universe. Maybe this planet will be it.
She had precious little space to move in; this spot had been left empty, either as an engineering oversight or as a way to make potential repairs easier. So she carefully slid down the side of the pipe and touched her boots down on the grating that allowed airflow through this little tunnel.
There was surely some maintenance hatch somewhere, but Saketa hadn’t bothered to look for it those eight hours ago. For all that she was diminished, she did retain one trick. Saketa pictured the spot down below, strained her frayed will a bit, and Shifted.
She passed through the folds of reality and found herself standing in a slightly greasy corner, the furthest one she’d been able to find without trespassing into the crew area.
The din was only getting louder. Five thousand people, well beyond official capacity, had been spread over three decks for the duration of the journey, but with disembarkment in sight people were starting to pour down from the two top ones.
It was a diverse mass of humanity. A few seemed like typical travellers; workers, couriers and the like, but most were clearly that regrettable sign of the times: Refugees. The people were ragged in body, spirit, and dress. Many clearly hadn’t been able to bathe in quite a while, and more money had gone into fares than food. The people were also disproportionately female and/or quite young.
There was a lot of crying, that sound evolution had made so unbearably piercing, and of bumping, arguing and other high-strung interactions. Saketa reluctantly joined the slow, poorly coordinated flow. She tried to hug one of the walls for the sake of at least not having the mess all around her, but the flow had a will of its own and directed her deeper into itself.
All sorts of languages featured in the din, some of which dominated as cultural groups tried to stick together, and a few of which Saketa had a limited understanding of. Some, or perhaps most, of this mass of misery was on the latest leg of a lengthy journey, bouncing from planet to station to planet, in search of someplace, anyplace, that would allow them to stay.
She heard passing mentions of far-flung locations, tiny little bits of the ongoing war and the rumours surrounding it, and a couple of people had mobile devices out and were going through holographic displays of footage. Saketa disregarded the first person she saw doing it, and very nearly did so to the second as well, until she spotted a fleeting image from some warzone or another. It was of a figure in black and red, mostly the former, surrounded by fire and destruction. The picture had either been taken from a great distance away or with inferior technology, but there was enough resolution for her to recognise the figure for what it was, if not who exactly.
The rumours were true. Well, of course they were.
The exhausted-looking man holding the device, who had a heavy-looking bag on his back and a days-old bandage on his forehead, noticed her interest in the image and the handful of others like it he scrolled through.
He said something she didn’t understand, then switched languages.
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“Finngala Sector. Sixth Fleet.”
She nodded, and left it at that. The flow continued to have a mind of its own, and it was best to follow it.
Soon came the slight queasy feeling of atmospheric entry on board on an old ship, and the physical effects did absolutely nothing to improve tempers. The crying children took things up a notch and the adult voices became on average just a little bit more cutting, a little bit more loud, and the atmosphere got more tense as everyone’s personal space shrank under the weight of the mob.
Saketa closed her eyes. The discord of the spirit would have been clear enough to her, through what remained of her old sensitivity. There was no escaping that. But the noise on top of that… did people need to be so damn noisy? Did they always have to be emotion-driven animals?
She couldn’t stop herself from getting angry. She didn’t have the strength. Not with the darkness on her shoulders.
Up ahead, in one of the last spots with elbow room, two groups seemed just about ready to escalate things into violence. On the left was a group of women in blue outfits that for the most part matched. Saketa didn’t recognise the style. For all she knew they could be anything from eatery employees to deserting combat pilots. What mattered was the growing wildness of the confrontation, as the blue women shouted and gesticulated with increasingly frantic energy.
To the right was an equally female, but less uniform and slightly smaller group, only really identifiable as a group by the way they stood together against the other one. They looked to be on the defensive, standing their ground and trying to make do with volume in place of aggressive movements.
Saketa took advantage of the elbow room and defied the current to a minor degree; enough to steer herself towards the confrontation. Those women’s negative energy was spilling around. Many of those closest to them were joining in the shouting, either taking sides or simply demanding they stop, and in a wider radius the mood of violence was spreading.
She’d just reached the whole thing when one of the blue women took the next step, closed the distance, and shoved one in the opposing group. The air felt dangerous, as if it was filling up with combustible gas.
Saketa moved in between and caught the woman’s wrist in a grip. The blue one turned her way and met Saketa’s sharp, dangerous glare.
“Stop it.”
The woman angrily tried to yank her arm free, but Saketa was a good deal stronger. Coupled with a lifetime of training it made controlling the limb a trivial matter. The woman switched to kicking at her leg, so Saketa wrenched and made her grip painful, and forced her to bend over.
Another blue shouted something indignant and kicked as Saketa, with a shin that hadn’t been desensitised to impact day after day, year after year. Saketa kicked back with one that had, right into the softer shin, and the woman collapsed. A third one came in and shoved with all her strength.
It broke free: The rage. The directionless hate. Saketa threw the woman in her grip aside and went at the shover with a one-two-three combo to the face. The impacts were dull on her callused fists, but the adrenaline burst that came with each one was a glorious, ugly rush.
Something impacted on the back of Saketa’s skull and tipped her forward. She’d taken harder hits, but with everything else it was just enough to disorient her enough for a quartet of fumbling, brutal arms to grab and pull her down. She saw a pair of blue-clad legs from the direction of the blow. She ignored the sloppy punches that came down at her back, and focused on stopping the kick that came in from those legs.
She caught a foot and twisted. Something soft in the ankle yielded with a snap, and the woman shrieked with pain. At least two more were still holding her down, so her hand closed around the knife hilt. The blade slid from the sheath and she plunged it down into the nearest boot.
There was another scream, and a loosening of the weight. Saketa drove the butt of the handle into a knee, and with that she was able to rise. The blues were falling back, seemingly trying to escape through the surrounding cracks in the crowd. One was either trying to stand her ground, or the type to freeze up, but either way she was stationary and Saketa caught her by the collar.
She smashed the butt into the woman’s face, then did it again, then-
Saketa came to her senses. This was wrong.
Cruelty springs from weakness.
She released the woman, who dropped down to join four of her comrades, and Saketa sheathed the knife as she turned on her heel. She pulled the hood of the coat up, so her bright-red hair wouldn’t stand out in the crowd, and then plunged herself into the nearest crack. The mass of people closed in around her, and once she left the radius of immediate witnesses behind she’d effectively vanished.
The flow actually came to a stop, finally, as the front of it was now fully packed, and with a bit of patience Saketa was able to worm her way through, further away from the scene she’d left behind and towards the hull.
That had been stupid, in a variety of ways. Utterly beneath the training and talents she’d been gifted with. How had she let that one blue woman get behind her? And a Warden was to act in defence, never in cruelty. But then, she was hardly a Kalero Warden anymore, was she?
Failure.
She arrived at one of a handful of small, squat windows lining the wall, and leaned her forehead against it. The ship was descending the final few hundred metres, but such sights had lost their magic. She just closed her eyes.
Failure.
That slightly queasy feeling stopped, and a few seconds later there was the shudder of docking. Saketa opened her eyes again. The view through the window was almost entirely taken up by the capital’s impressively large docking yard, so she didn’t dare risk a Shift just yet. She waited for the sound of the disembarking alarm, and joined the renewed stream out into the reception area of the tower they’d docked at. Glowing signs in several languages warned new arrivals of the basics to keep in mind, most prominently the very strict controls on personal firearms.
Saketa had done some basic research before setting out, and gotten the impression that the locals were far more relaxed regarding melee weapons; those were a firm part of the cultural landscape. Still, she couldn’t afford delays, or potential repercussions for that whole business with the blue women, so as the crowd moved down three separate staircases towards a customs and scanner area she took the first chance to step into a large windowsill.
Now she could take in the view. The area down below, before the docking yards, was quite flat and open, presumably to accommodate heavy traffic, with wide roads leading this way and that into a city that, at first glance, seemed quite well planned-out.
She selected an empty spot down on the ground below, in the shadow of some support building or another, and Shifted. No one yelped out loud or sounded an alarm, so her appearance had gone unnoticed.
Saketa simply walked out of cover and onto the huge plaza that surrounded the yards. She turned and looked at the towers, then walked some distance until she could do so without bending her spine backwards.
Most of the more developed, centralised planets only had a handful of places where spaceships were allowed to dock or take off. This planet, Saketa understood, only had one, so it made sense for the yards to stretch both wide and high. Each tower was tall enough to make the bulky transport she’d arrive in seem small, and to accommodate at least a dozen more like it. And buried far below the surface were the massive generators needed to recharge leap reactors on such a scale.
Off to the east a ragged mass much like the one Saketa had just travelled with was emerging from another tower, and being received by a team of people in matching white and orange, somewhat flowing outfits. Already there were some basic medical checks being done on children, and adults who carried themselves with the air of being injured. Food was on offer from steaming carts, and mixed in with the white and orange were people in less distinctive clothing, with a somewhat official air about them.
Saketa didn’t know if this was a religious group, or perhaps simply a humanitarian one with a religious aesthetic, and she didn’t care. Either way, these people were tending to the spirit, the soul, of their community.
Their opposite wasn’t far off. The local law enforcement, which she’d made sure to research, had lined themselves up to block a pedestrian street. Beyond it was a line of angry-looking people, screaming to be heard over the music being played by those receiving the refugees. Some of the screamers were openly wearing a symbol that had gained a dreadful prominence on the Nearer Fringe: White shoulder flaps with stylised blood drops drawn on them.
Saketa wasn’t close enough to hear their words over the music, and didn’t speak any of the local tongues anyway. But she didn’t need to. These people were ravaged by a well-known kind of frenzied hate, and their chants were equally familiar.
From what she could tell, the law officers weren’t carrying lethal weapons, just some lesser options and impressive combat sticks, but they were backed up by several hovering drones that might be equipped with just about anything. Still, this local variant of the Purist ideology seemed to balance right on the edge of violence. It looked like all it would take was one officer losing their cool or one protestor finding their courage, if that was the right word for it, and the situation would explode.
Saketa walked off the street, onto a well-tended stretch of grass and small trees. It wasn’t long before she had a view of the Purists without any of the officers getting in the way. She stared at them, these wretches, and felt her own darkness coil and boil within.
She hated them. The disease they carried wore different guises, but was ultimately always the same. It was the one that she was sworn to fight against, and which had brought so much pain into her life.
Saketa pictured herself summoning power and sending a wave into the mob, blowing them off their feet and into the air. It would be a little touch of pain and fear, paid back at them, and it would silence their shrill, idiot voices for a moment.
Didn’t they deserve it? Perhaps a real wave. One that broke bones.
Saketa shook her head. Even if she could pull that off, she was failing. Again.
She continued on, and tried to focus on her breathing as she left the scene behind.