Original Art by Adriaan Suy
image [https://i.imgur.com/Y97WXDF.jpeg]
Something I learned from being around Dorja—it takes sacrifice to be great at something. I mean, to truly be great. Not just superb, not just expert. To be great means constant pursuit of the thing. I had perhaps underestimated her resolve. I once experienced such obsessive behavior as she when I first trained as a scout, but not for so prolonged a period. Such devotion to an art means one has time for little else besides training. I wondered, as always, how long she’d been like this. It was never more obvious than when you noticed that while she could fly a ship, and press the right buttons and flip the right switches to do the fuel mixtures and the takeoff cycles and landing runs, she didn’t have the faintest idea how any serious repairs were to be done to her ship. I asked her, “What sort of guns you got on this?” And she said, “Veringulf only has one gun, and Dorja doesn’t know its name, only how to use it.” She couldn’t tell you its—his make, she insisted on calling the ship a ‘he’—or his model or even his full shield capabilities. And yet, you should see her fly that ship! Gifted at its use, hopeless when it came time to fix it. She was a terrific, often humorous contradiction. – from the journals of Solomon Kirek, scout, ~720 DE (Doom Era)
The first time Dorja formally met all eight Kennison children was in the confines of the cargo bay. They had all assembled to hear the bad news, and it was up to Dorja to ease them into it—Kirek had made it clear it was her ship, so she ought to take the lead, but he would back up her up with any questions concerning security and safety. “We’re going to teach you how tactical maneuvers in space are done,” she told them, watching each of the little upturned faces (ranging from three years to thirteen) as they went through different stages of fright. “Dorja does not want you to worry, these are only precautions, but you all should know how evasive maneuvers work.” She was careful not to say combat, not that the distinction changed much. “It may be different than what you’ve heard in stories.”
Turtle sat in Kirek’s lap. The girl was hearing all this for the first time along with the Kennisons, and stared unblinkingly at her Master.
Dorja paced in front of them all, weeping-hands on her hips, reaching-arms folded across her chest. “If evasive maneuvers begin, you will all be sequestered to your rooms, all except Kirek and Dorja. We will be in the cockpit. Dorja will do the piloting while Kirek manages guns. Once you are sealed in your rooms you must not try to leave, and you must remain inside your vac-suits.”
Luke raised a hand. “Uh, why?”
Dorja looked at him, noted the fear in his face. A man’s deep, impotent fear for his family. “Because every room and corridor on this ship will be sealed tight and atmosphere will be vented.”
Hela Kennison’s eyes widened, and she hugged her youngest daughter tight. “You’re…going to make this ship airless?”
“This makes it so that if ever a projectile—”
“Projectile?”
Dorja sighed. “If a tungsten round or plasma beam pierces Veringulf’s hull, it will not vent us out into space or send loose, heavy objects flying around the cabin.”
“Dorja and me will be sealed into the cockpit with limited atmo,” Kirek said. “Having limited artificial atmosphere across the ship will reduce the stress on the life-support and make us look not so obvious on heat-imaging sensors.”
Luke exchanged a worried look with Hela, who shook her head ruefully. Dorja imagined that they’d had many arguments about whether or not they should have come aboard Veringulf and abandoned their homeworld, that perhaps they ought to have stayed and fought (as useless as that would’ve been) or else tried to find another ship headed off-world (also useless). Luke sighed wearily and said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No,” Dorja said.
“Just watch after your family,” Kirek said. “Make sure they’re strapped in. When the action starts—if it starts,” he corrected himself, “we all need to be on the same page. No playing kickball down the corridor or grabbing a bite from the galley while the maneuvers are going on.”
Luke looked uneasy. His wife squeezed the hand of her youngest son, Jareth.
“Dorja wants to be honest with all of you,” she said, glancing down at Turtle, who looked worried but wasn’t showing outright fear. Dorja was proud of her, and assumed she’d been through a lot in her time as a slave, or whatever she had been to Vash’tik and the people who kept her caged. “If we come out of our next jump, and these people are still following us, Dorja will make for evasive maneuvers and try to make a micro-jump into the slipstream. This will take us only a short distance away, half a lightyear, no more. If we do a series of these, we may be able to shake them. If they keep following us, well…then they will likely realize that we are on to them.”
“And then they may attack,” Kirek put in. “May. We don’t know what they want from us, if anything. They may be as lost as we are.”
“Yes. But if they do attack,” Dorja said, upset that Kirek had used that word, “Dorja will send out the alert to strap yourselves in. You should already be inside your vac-suits and have spare air tanks close by, just in case it is a long chase.”
“I’ve never worn a vac-suit,” Luke said. “None of us have.”
Dorja looked around at their frightened faces. In that moment, she had an epiphany. They are ikah—alone. At least they feel that way. Their world and people are all gone, they are like Dorja. They are ikah. Despite everything they’ve managed to hold on to, despite the breath in their lungs, they still feel that deep solitude and hopelessness. She resolved then to show them it was never hopeless. They will see the warmth of Dorja’s candle. In time, they will feel it. That was, after all, the Oath of the Candle.
“—and there’s really nothing to it,” Kirek was saying. “You put the vac-suit on, it cinches itself up automatically to fit your form, no matter your size. Easy as anvekki’k pie. There’s a small computer on your left and right wrists that control temperature, airflow, de-fogging, and you can adjust the fit however you like.” He smiled over at the Kennison children. “There’s even holo-games you can play against your helmet’s visor. It’s pretty fun! I’ll show you how.”
Some of the kids smiled back. Dorja was glad that Kirek at least had this sort of influence, a more playful adult than the others aboard Veringulf.
“I don’t know, Luke,” Hela said to her husband. “I just don’t know about this.”
“What don’t you know, luv?” Luke said back. “We don’t have much other choice—”
“Da,” said one of the children, a small, shaggy-haired girl named Conlinda, who was playing with a hole in the arm of her jumpsuit. “Are we going to have to fight pirates?”
“No, voszh,” he said, using some Herenovian pet name. “It isn’t going to be like that.”
“How do you know that, Lucas?” Hela said tersely.
They got into a small bickering match, with Luke trying to keep his family calm.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” said Kirek, soto voce.
Dorja just gave him an even look that said Not now. They needed to keep up a confident, united front.
After they were finished answering questions—mostly the same questions just reworded differently—everyone split up and went to their unspoken “territories” aboard Veringulf. Dorja walked back to the cockpit with Kirek, and Turtle followed close behind, lightly swinging her bokken side to side. Recently, Turtle could scarcely be found without her new practice sword, and swung the wooden blade slowly as she went through the stances Dorja had taught her.
“Do you think they’ll panic?” Kirek muttered in a low voice.
Dorja sat in the pilot’s seat and looked out at the black void ahead of them; they were still traveling soundlessly through the slipstream, though no movement was apparent at all from their vantage, except for the feathers of blueshift energy that occasionally slithered over the windows. “Who can say if they will panic?” she replied. “Dorja has seen soldiers panic, and seen cowards summon uncommon courage. Who can say?”
“What happens if they panic?” Turtle said, leaning against Dorja’s armrest. “Are you going to gas them?”
Dorja looked at her aghast. “Gas them? Why should Turtle think—”
“On the first ship that took me, if anybody got rowdy or started fighting, the captain would gas everyone in the room until they fell asleep.”
“Suppression gas,” Kirek nodded, taking a seat in the copilot’s chair. “Seen it a few times myself on long hauls, especially when there was cabin fever. Though, usually it was only on law enforcement vessels, like Free Ranger freighters.” He shrugged. “Hate to say, but not a bad idea. You got anything like that on Veringulf, Dorja?”
“No, Dorja does not.” She looked at them both uncomfortably. “Veringulf was only ever meant to carry Dorja and her Master, and perhaps to rescue people when Dorja could. It never occurred to Dorja…”
Kirek seemed to sense her discomfort, and nodded. “Right, makes sense. Not your style, I get it. But if they panic…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Dorja looked back at Turtle. “Shouldn’t you be practicing Form One?” Turtle made a sour face, then turned and left. When she was gone, Dorja looked back at Kirek. “If we get boarded—”
“That’s not gonna happen,” he said. “I’m a surgeon on a quad turret. I may be a bit rusty but I won’t let whoever it is out there stalking us board this ship.”
“But if it does happen, you will defend Turtle and the others?”
Kirek tilted his head quizzically. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I thought we had gotten to know each other pretty good.”
“Will you defend them?” Dorja repeated.
The scout leaned a little closer to her. “With. My. Life.”
Dorja nodded. She believed him, but it never hurt to hear it. Trust, but verify, her Master used to say. She turned her attention back to the black void of the slipstream, the blue wash of energy suddenly lighting up the cockpit. She stared ahead at nothingness, wondering what they were in for.
* * *
When next they came out of the slipstream into realspace, Dorja was strapped into the pilot’s seat, piloting gloves pulled on tight, hands gripping controls. Ready in case their shadow made an appearance. She looked out at the stars as they resolved back into the usual starry fields of the Milky Way. Checked her sensors. Reports were coming in, replete with heat bounce-back and alpha wave readings. She saw nothing. Measured all previous readings against the CMB, the cosmic microwave background.
“See anything?” Kirek said from the copilot’s seat.
Dorja shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Not seeing anything on neutron-imaging, I don’t think—wait a sec, I got something.” With a quick swipe of the hand he sent over a still image to Dorja’s main station screen, which then emitted the image in three dimensions. “Looks like a freighter. Don’t know it. Ornery-looking thing, though, you ask me.”
With a gesture, Dorja embiggened the mottled purple-gray image, which had come from neutron-imaging scopes that worked out the fuzzy outline, and slowly resolved it. The ship’s AI washed the image, clearing it up. The vessel was a boxy thing, with attached missile carriers and spare fuel tanks added, with absolutely no concessions made to style. The flattened sides meant this ship wouldn’t fare too well in atmospheric flight, at least not more than what its reciprocal field could pull off when ejecting it into orbit.
Dorja also noticed it gave off almost no heat. An old familiar feeling came over her, from a handful of times she’d been stalked across vacuum in the past. “They’re running cold,” she said.
“I noticed. Probably the crew are all living inside their vac-suits, turning off the ship’s life-support, all other systems on standby.” Kirek tapped a few keys, bringing up cross-band readings. “They’re not broadcasting. Not on X-band, not on anything. And there’s no Bussard radiation trail leading to any other star system close by, so they didn’t come from around here.” He looked at her. “They’ definitely popped out of the slipstream.”
Dorja ran a finger across her jawline, and beside her Kirek noticed her tracing the lines of those white tattoos woven intricately across her face. He hadn’t yet asked what those were about, if they were personal style or some sort of tradition of her people.
Dorja said, “Set a course.”
“To where?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just a micro-jump, not too far.”
“That’ll take at least ten or twenty minutes to arrange. Engines just went on cooldown. And there’s a star went nova a couple million years ago, computer thinks the radiation is still reverberating in the slipstream, that could prevent the ship’s navicomputer from accepting the course. Too dangerous. And there’s a cluster of micro singularities floating around out here somewhere, apparently. Unless these scopes are lying to me.” Kirek hoped Dorja understood what that meant. Micro singularities were basically miniature black holes left over from the beginning of the universe, and had been flying around like stray bullets ever since. He’d rarely seen this many tracked in all his years of scouting, and even though Dorja appeared to be well traveled it also seemed as if she had some large gaps in her education concerning many natural sciences and starship mechanics. “We fly wildly through a storm of those, we could be torn to shreds.”
“Dorja understands,” she said, tapping her chin pensively. She reached forward to pick up the green piece of Alexandrite sitting on top of the trouble-board, the last piece of Herenov she’d taken with her. “Take your time, but plot the micro-jump. Dorja wants to see if they follow us.”
“Jumping around like that will look sloppy. We’ll look like tourists, like we’re lost. If they’re pirates, that’ll make us look even more tantalizing.”
“Dorja knows this. Do it anyway.”
Kirek started conferring with the ship’s AI. “I do as Lady Dorja commands,” he sighed. “Micro-jump coming up.”
* * *
After they made the micro-jump, they sat in the near tomb-silence of the cockpit, listening to the air-recyclers humming, watching their scopes. At first it appeared they’d lost their shadow. Then, a small shape appeared on neutron-imaging scopes, the same blocky vessel they’d seen before, only this time much farther out, close to a thousand miles. Dorja zoomed in on the image and said, “Again.”
“Again?” Kirek said, incredulous.
“Yes. Plot another micro-jump.”
“To where?”
“Anywhere.”
Kirek thought, Does she understand the strain this puts on an A-drive?
Dorja was thinking, There is no room for mistakes when dealing with pirates and raiders. The words of Master Jerrod coming back to her. “Plot the jump. Dorja will message the passengers, and tell everyone to stay strapped in.”
It took twenty minutes to plot another course, and they dipped back into the slipstream for less than half an hour. When they popped back out, they did a deep-field sweep. Kirek warned Dorja that going sensor-active would only alert their shadow that they were aggressively searching the void. She said, “Dorja knows,” and did it anyway. Then, after a few moments of waiting, she saw the boxy vessel appear once again on neutron-imaging. Without looking up from her screen, she said, “Again.”
Becoming frustrated, Kirek plotted yet another course, and once again they exited the slipstream to find their shadow where it always was, directly behind them, a thousand or so miles off, keeping cold. “Gods above, these people are like a lone vulture,” he said, almost whispering, as though the unknown vessel could hear him. “They’ve spotted what they think is a wounded animal, they’re coasting in our wake, watching from the darkness to see if we fall over dead.”
Dorja nodded. “Seeing if we run out of fuel.”
“Yes. That is what it looks like.”
So far, their shadow had not attacked, which at least indicated they weren’t sure what sort of armaments Veringulf had, if any. So they can’t be very strong. Probably desperate. Only reason to be out this far with one ship and no fleet or caravan. But the basic facts remained, they had a tenacious shadow on their heels and he, she or they were not going away.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Plot another course. A longer one this time.”
“Where to?” Kirek sighed, fully expecting her to say anywhere again.
But she surprised him when she said, “Saito Sector.”
Kirek looked over at her sharply. “Saito Sector?”
She sent him a coordinate grouping, an assembly of letters and numbers that denoted a specific destination. The Milky Way galaxy was broken up into navigable chunks: first into four Sectors, broken up into eight hundred Sector Quadrants each, further into two hundred Sector Blocks apiece, then into twenty Decants, further into ten Pentants, and finally into three hundred Haplants each. But even those coordinate groupings—which the ones Kirek was looking at were S3.SQ758.SB128.D7.P6.H293—were themselves still only a sort of ballpark figure. There were Local Coordinates to deal with once they found themselves in the vicinity of Saito Sector.
Kirek had traveled the galactic spacelanes for decades, mostly along the established trade routes. Often enough, hunting a fugitive would give him cause to stray off the beaten path into uncharted space. And there was a lot of that. In fact, most space was uncharted. He’d only ever heard of Saito Sector because that’s where Wyrmdov was, and its reputation was sub-scum, completely trash even for a galaxy experiencing the Doom. It was a place filled with fiends.
Kirek had told Dorja about Saito Sector when they first left Herenov, and he’d thought that her mission to save Senjelica might’ve taken a backseat, what with all their other problems. “You sure you still want to go there? The Hekkites…they’ll have friends there. We’ll have none.”
“Dorja isn’t afraid of pirates.”
“These ones you might be.” He leaned back in his seat. “I’ll be honest, Dorja, I wasn’t…that is, I had hoped you’d changed your mind. The girl…she’s likely already dead, and there’s no family left for her to return to. Herenov is gone—”
“Dorja hasn’t changed her mind,” she said adamantly.
Kirek sighed. “Well, then. I guess I’ll set a direct course—”
“Not yet.”
“Say again?”
“First, Dorja wants you to turn our bow to face the ship that’s been shadowing us. Dorja wants you to fly towards them, coasting on quarter-impulse power.”
Kirek could not have been more surprised if she’d grown a second head. “I’m…sorry?”
“Move towards them. Make no broadcast. Tell Turtle and the Kennisons to get inside their vac-suits and be ready in case. We will shut off all our life-support. We will go as cold as they are.”
Kirek shook his head, about to argue. Then it hit him. It was so simple a plan he wondered if he hadn’t greatly underestimated this creature. He should’ve seen it, because he’d seen a couple of Free Rangers pull it off once or twice. “You’re bluffing. That’s what this was, all these micro-jumps. You’ve pulled us deeper and deeper into remote space, no close star systems. If we turn around to face them—”
“We make them think that it is we who are the hunters, that it’s at least possible that we’ve led them out here to their own demise, into our ambush.”
“That’s…actually not a bad plan.” He smiled at her. “You can be a sneaky one sometimes, Dorja.”
“It runs in Dorja’s family.”
“Speaking of that,” he said, prepping the life-support for shutoff. “You mentioned before that you had a sister. What happened to her?”
Dorja glanced at him sidelong. “Why do you want to know?”
“It’s gonna take a minute to warm the A-drive back up, grab the coords from the navicomputer. Figured we could pass the time and cool our nerves with a bit of a chinwag.”
“Dorja’s nerves are fine.” She gave him another brief look of warning.
Kirek held up his hands defensively. “Fine, forget I asked.” He returned to the problem at hand, and tried getting back into her good graces. “This plan of yours, I’m not sure I would’ve thought of it. We barely have any armaments, so we probably can’t go up against them in a direct fight. At least this way we may be able to get them to back off. Smart.” He tilted his head, thinking more on it. “However, if they’re out this far, it must mean they’re desperate. Even if they back off, they may not do so for long.”
“Dorja only needs them to back off until we reach Saito.”
* * *
Kirek did as Dorja bade him, and once they made sure everyone was still sealed inside their vac-suits and locked inside their rooms, Kirek turned Veringulf slowly towards their shadow, and started coasting. Half-impulse, just as the blue beauty commanded. It wasn’t five minutes before they saw the heat bloom on scopes. The engines on the unknown boxy vessel flared and it banked away, heading deeper into the nothingness of space. It was clear they were running, and it was clear as to why.
“Your plan worked,” Kirek said, breathing a small sigh of relief.
“For now,” said Dorja. “But eventually we must turn and head for Saito Sector. When we do that, they may realize we were bluffing and return to their hunt.”
Kirek nodded. That was indeed a possibility, but one which they would have to wait and see. He looked over at her. “Still want me to plot a course to Saito? Wyrmdov…it’s a strange place. Don’t expect to find Senjelica there—”
“You are suddenly trying to talk Dorja out of this,” she said, turning sharply to him. “Even when you knew this was Dorja’s plan all along. A word of advice. Don’t ever try to talk Dorja out of anything. Ever. Dorja is Dorja. Senjelica may yet live, and as long as Dorja draws breath, help is always coming.” She unbuckled her seat restraints and stood up, looking down at him. “You said you wanted to share the candle. That is the Oath of the Candle. Now, set a course. And let Dorja know before you make the jump.”
He turned in his seat, and watched her exit the cockpit. “Where are you going?”
“To train.”
He called back to her, “You know, I talked to the Kennisons. They still want off this ship ASAP. They’re getting more and more stir-crazy.”
“Dorja will release them at a place she deems safe.”
Kirek listened to her soft footsteps until they were gone. But there’s no such place out here, he thought, but kept it to himself. Why argue with Dorja the Blade? Dorja was Dorja, it seemed. It was clear that once her mind was made up, only the Brood might shake her off her path.
Might, he thought.
* * *
While alone in the cargo bay, Dorja sat with her legs crossed, reaching-hands resting on her knees, weeping-hands outstretched. She commanded her pores to open, to feel the intake of chi, absorbing it so that it heated the center of her palms and the faery lights began to glow. She focused her mind on the very center of her dantian, and for every breath she took, she sent its invigorating energy directly into her center and felt it flow down between her legs, moving around until it reached the small of her back, moving up between her upper shoulder blades.
Each breath carried her chi and intent with it, turning her body into an antenna, a receptor for the zero field.
The chi traveled up to the top of her head, down through her tongue and into the center of her chest, and, at last, into her belly, back safely into the dantian. With her fiftieth small orbit complete, she stood up slowly, still feeling the furnace of energy coursing through her. Lifting her glaive, she began Form IX. Right foot forward, weight back on her rear leg, the tip of her glaive pointed down, ready to sweep upward.
Slowly, she began circling the blade tip out in front of her, moving forward in a series of low cross-steps, giving her quads a heavy workout by lunging so low that her knees sometimes grazed the floor. She struck out at nobody, jabbing with the bottom of the glaive’s shaft, then batted an imaginary attack aside and thrust with the blade.
Back and forth across the room she repeated this motion, spinning the glaive, alternating grips between her weeping-hands and reaching-hands, sometimes holding with all four hands, or just one. Now she combined her previous small orbit breathing exercises with the motions, moving chi throughout her body, somewhat clumsily. It was difficult to be physically, emotionally, and spiritually present, all at the same time. As soon as one’s body became fully involved in combative training, the physical tended to take over, demanding aggressive force, clouding the mind and spirit.
This could cause one’s focus to deplete.
Dorja must fight that habit, she thought, going through Form IX’s more difficult motions. A series of quick, staccato attacks, quick thrusts to an imaginary opponent’s centerline, then a series of high-low-high attacks, then low-high-low, looking to reap her enemy’s feet out from underneath them. Sweat poured from her, and she felt the heat rising in her weeping-hands.
Legs aching from acids pouring into every muscle fiber, Dorja took a break, drinking water and taking in deep breaths.
She looked over at the essence box, sitting on the floor atop a velvet cloth. “Are you there?” she asked. Neither the essence box nor its inhabitant answered her.
Dorja vented a frustrated growl.
At the far end of the cargo bay was a compristeel crate she’d been eyeing for days now. The crate, which sat beside other crates in a bit of a kludge. They’d been turned into ad-hoc work benches, tablecloths draped over them, tools arrayed. She walked over, opened the crate. Inside was Garrius, one of her oldest training bots, nearly busted to bits. She took it out and set it up on its stand.
Garrius was a T’vydian-Δ training bot that Master Jerrod had purchased from some desert world call Runnevald-XII. It was mostly a reinforced cylindrical barrel, with robotic arms, head, and chest covered in a gel-inflated, mix-weave synthflesh, with three gyroscopic inserts to keep it balanced when being batted around. It was a Level 0.5 AI, not possessed of complex thinking, built only to read and interpret its opponent’s movements and retaliate at twelve different levels of intensity.
Dorja placed a bokken in Garrius’s hand and grabbed her own wooden practice glaive. “Intensity Level Seven,” she said.
“Hello, Dorja,” Garrius said, its vox warbly and faint. She hadn’t used it in a while, its power cells were failing and she didn’t have a replacement for it. “So good to see you. You will regret this.”
Dorja smiled briefly. The bot was trained to say things like that, to simulate an enemy trying to get under her skin. “Dorja is sure she will,” she said, and got into a low un’tvink guard position, one of the five defensive stances of Form IX, and there she waited. Garrius got low, its servos whining and grinding loudly. It raised its bokken above its head in high vom tag, the sword tip aimed at the ceiling.
Neither of them moved, the very quintessence of statues. The flat, lifeless eyes of the bot appeared dead.
Garrius inched forward. Dorja did not move. Garrius inched again. Dorja remained perfectly still, waiting.
Then the bot surged forward, lunging and swiping down and Dorja batted the attack away, spun her glaive around her back, passing it from her lower-right weeping-hand to her upper-left reaching-hand, attacking on a downward oberhau to the bot’s collarbone. Garrius brought its bokken up in time to deflect, but Dorja performed a gissard, sliding the blade-tip of her wooden glaive down the length of the bokken and swiping Garrius’s hand.
The bot leapt back, gears rattled, servos whining, and lunged at her.
They went back and forth with quick, questing attacks, neither one scoring a definitive win, parrying and dancing away from one another’s thrusts. Garrius’s free hand was fast, shooting in to check her elbow to keep her from swinging with enough force to penetrate his defense.
This went on for half an hour. Dorja barely recognized the subtle shaking of the walls and the brief vertiginous lurch as Veringulf re-entered the slipstream. She trusted Kirek to do the piloting, she was disappearing into the training like she hadn’t in ages.
Sweat poured into puddles on the floor. Dorja entered into flow state, that condition of “no-mind” every warrior searched for, when they could see only the chess game of combat as a disconnected thing, to view the entire combat in a sort of clinical detachment, only viewing what must be done, synthesizing all their training into one ever-evolving piece of art—
“That glow from your hands,” a voice said. “It is most remarkable. What is your species?”
Dorja spun and nearly attacked the hologram. Master Korvix stood fifteen feet away, squarely in the doorway, as though he had just come from the galley. His hands were clasped in front of him, within the elongated sleeves of his robe. His tall, imposing frame seemed to command the entire room, his eyes veiled, his lips the only part of his face visible for the shadow cast by his hood.
“You,” she said, panting and wiping her brow. She raised herself from her combative ch’q’svig stance. But she’d forgotten to switch Garrius off and she received a heavy thwack! to the back of her head. “Stand down!” she shouted, and the bot immediately went limp still. She turned back to the hologram. “It is—” she panted, “—about time, dead man.”
“Is it?”
“Dorja has been waiting. She’s been trying to talk to the dead man, but the dead man hasn’t listened.”
“Dorja? That’s you?”
She nodded. “It is.”
“I only needed to be sure,” the hologram said, rippling for a moment, like water with a stone skipping across it. “I can hear everything going on out here from inside there,” he said, pointing to the essence box sitting on the floor at the far side of the room, “but time is…strange in there. I am not always sure when I am speaking. For instance, have you answered my question yet? The one about your species.”
Dorja squinted. “You mean the one you just asked?”
The hologram rippled again, and briefly winked out of existence before returning, freeze-framed, then became animated again. “I cannot be sure if I know all about you, your home, your mother, your sister and you Master yet, or if that’s all still in my future. We’ve had this discussion—or will have it, are having it—many times.”
She shook her head. “What do you mean? Are you a spirit? Did the Stone Gods send you?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“What do you want?”
“Haven’t I already said? Perhaps I haven’t. As I said, time is funny inside the box. I think I’m still at a point where I’m ignorant—even though I’m certain you’ve told me already, or will tell me—so I’m going to assume for the moment, for the purposes of relative linearity, that you haven’t.”
“Haven’t what? Dorja doesn’t understand. You…see the future? And the past? You see it all as one?”
“Forget everything I just said. Or will say. Let us try this again. How much do you wish to know of the Ten Exalted Fists?”
“You’ve asked Dorja this before.”
“I’m sure,” Master Korvix said. “And I will certainly ask you again.”
“Dorja wishes to know more. She wants to know what these Ten Exalted Fists are.”
“I told you before—or did I?—that it is a fighting style. I believe at the time you told me—or will tell me—that your Master taught you all you needed. I advised that you empty your cup to taste someone else’s tea. Or was that you?”
“That was Dorja, yes.”
“So, then—was that long ago?”
Dorja shrugged. “It was recently.”
Korvix smiled, his hologram rippled. “You will have to be more specific.”
She fought back mounting frustration, and paced around the hologram, noticing that he (it?) did not track her. Dorja wondered again if this was a Level 2 artificial intelligence or something surpassing. Everyone knew you had to be wary of anything past a 2. It was Level 3’s that instigated the Shadow War through misinformation, pitting sentient organics against others without them knowing it was the deceptive Level 3’s stoking it all along. It was Level 4’s that had developed a streak of independence, set out across the stars battling their masters, then fled to parts unknown, never seen again. People used to fear their return, until the Brood came. As the saying went concerning AIs: First comes ignorance, then playfulness, then independence, then war.
They couldn’t be trusted.
But Dorja was curious. And Master Jerrod had warned her that was her flaw.
“Dorja is open to learning more,” she said carefully. “If it is one of the Cultivation Arts.”
“Cultivation Arts?”
“Yes. An art that develops chi and encourages a purer existence.”
“Ah, in my time we called it…ah, Vi’orziún? I think? Ascension? It’s getting harder to remember.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I said it’s getting harder to remember—”
“No.” Dorja ground her teeth. “Is your fighting style Vi’orziún?”
“All worthwhile arts are. As I’ve said. Will say. Am saying.”
Dorja walked around him, looking him up and down. “Show me.”
The hologram tilted his head quizzically. The small smile, that never really left his lips, now shifted to one of intrigue. “You still haven’t answered my question. What species are you?”
“What does it matter?”
“I’d like to know what sort of thing I am addressing—”
“Thing! Dorja is no thing! The dead man will respect Dorja!”
“Quid pro quo,” he said calmly.
“What does that mean? Is that a spell?”
Korvix gave a small chuckle. “It’s no spell. Well, not really—”
“Then what does it mean?” she demanded.
“For something worthwhile given, something worthwhile exchanged,” Korvix said, now beginning to pace as well. They were now circling one another, Korvix occasionally freeze-framing and rippling. Dorja noticed the Blademaster’s robes made little shuffling noises, but his footsteps were as silent as the void. “An exchange between two professionals. I tell you something, you tell me something.”
“Dorja has nothing to share with an AI.”
“Your voice…so very strange, like many voices overlapping, almost like a song is coming from deep within your throat. Like you have a chorus trapped down inside there,” he said smiling. “At least tell me how that works. Or tell me a secret about you, something you don’t tell others.”
Dorja hesitated, circling the long-dead Master, wiping her sweating brow, wondering who this Blademaster had been, if he’d been this shifty in life. At last she said, “Dorja’s people do not have what you would call vocal cords.”
“Oh? Then how are you speaking?”
“Dorja’s people have a vocal organ much like a starling’s or a mimic-bird’s syrinx. It is a complex structure composed of membranes, muscles, and cartilage, located at the base of Dorja’s trachea where it splits off into the bronchi.”
“Oh, really? Hm. Of what evolutionary use was that, I wonder.”
She shrugged. “This organ allows Dorja’s people unusual vocal control for a humanoid, granting powers of high-level sound mimicry. If it is trained.”
“I said tell me a secret that no one knows. This all sounds like something out of an anthropologist’s notebook on—”
“No one on this ship knows. None of Dorja’s enemies know. This is a secret.”
“Oh?”
“Better if no one knows. Then no one suspects if Dorja needs to use it.”
Korvix stopped pacing. Turned his chin up enough that she could almost see one of his eyes under that hood. Almost. She wondered if the shadows were intended to be cast that way by the essence box’s designer. “Mimic something for me,” he said.
Dorja sighed. She squeezed her middle-throat, and opened her mouth. She had to take in a deep breath and squeeze it in her abdomen, then channel it quickly through her diaphragm and push the air out the narrow upper-throat opening. She then flexed the syrinx in undulating, tickling patterns that started to hurt the longer she did it. “How much do you wish to know of the Ten Exalted Fists?” she said, in a near pitch-perfect match of Master Korvix’s own voice. She didn’t have to move her lips, the syrinx did all of it.
Master Korvix gave a small grin, and Dorja misliked its nature. “Remarkable,” he said, shaking his head in small wonder, like he’d just seen a piece of fine art. “Simply remarkable. And so, your own voice…?”
“Is Dorja’s best rendition of human speech.”
“And moving your lips is, what, merely a formality? A way to sell the illusion?”
“Yes.” Dorja didn’t like to talk about this. It made her feel ikah, reminded her of just how alone she was. “Now, tell Dorja, what are these Ten Exalted Fists?” she said, eager to change the subject.
“A method of developing striking power, evasiveness, dexterity and conditioning. The Ten Exalted Fists are achieved by breaking the body down as it has never been before, then building it back up, like straightening an antenna and then boosting its signal, making it an even greater receptacle to chi, and then, ultimately, a broadcaster of it.”
She stepped towards the hologram, her nose within inches of Korvix’s face. “Tell Dorja how.”
The hologram rippled. “Are you sure? This training has often been called…inhumane.”
“Well,” she said, smiling grimly, “fortunately for you, dead man, Dorja is not human.”
Master Korvix looked her up and down, the blue-green hologram glitching for a moment, freezing before it vanished. Dorja started to call out to him when she heard his voice faintly, as though his lips were beside her ear. “You’re already exhausted. Get some rest. We’ll start next daycycle.”
Dorja cast around the cargo bay, but besides the distant rattle of the air vents, the room was silent. And she was alone with her thoughts. Old stories talked about the “spirits” trapped inside essence boxes, how unleashing them was not unlike unleashing a deceptive djinn. It was said they exacted a price. Because, at their core, they were AI.
And AI can never be trusted.
Dorja wondered what the price would be, and if she could even bring herself to pay it.
Suddenly, all her thoughts on the matter were scattered, when the loudspeaker gave two short blurts and Kirek’s voice said, “Lady Dorja, you might want to come have a look at this!”
“Is it our shadow?” she said, shaking herself out of the reverie and pulling on a robe. “Is he back?”
“No, it’s not our shadow.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just get up here. You need to see this.”
image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]