Chapter 5
Unlatching from his spot on the wall, he surveys the empty lobbies and halls around.
Tucked away in a small rock walled room, rests Logan’s unconscious body. With his suit’s engines unusable, the shoulder compartments clogged with fried circuit debris and half melted metal, he’s going to find it almost impossible to get out when he wakes up. Nothing of his did the guards take from him, because even in situations like this, or worse, to disarm an elite guard is like stripping a royal family of their possessions, and burning their homes. Guards of Logan’s status not only stand for the greatest that family offers, but they’re so close to the family that they’re nearly considered equal.
That, and he’s unconscious with most of his useful grafts shattered inside him. Rekkel may be dumb, but their assumptions remain somewhat competent regarding his ability to escape.
Shrouding calls to war also stall them from deciding to disarm him of anything he might use.
If one is to displace a member of a royal family, writes Agnes Fa, author of Plight of a Thousand Dumb Prisoners and Some Royal Schmucks, one should consider leaving them unmolested, well cared for, and all their valuables left alone – even if they hold a weapon capable of killing their captors. This is to ensure that there exists no reason that war between the families incites drawn out, bureaucratic fuss on the proper way to handle royal prisoners. This references an incident with royal family members of the ice planet Ululu, who were summarily captured, stripped of their weapons, forced to hear their captors sing, then met with the long truth. It was later discovered from a detective of Galactic Freelance of Agency and Case’s intern program that the captors, four sentient plant species called Tymopys, previously disagreed with the royal family of Ululu on a personal matter, before burning their houses and trapping the royal members on their trade ship for a period of five standard rotations. Agnes Fa finishes her report with a footnote clarifying that because of these standards of practice during tumultuous events, royal members, or their highest title of guard, find no reason to kill their captors and escape. Instead, most see it as a surprise vacation from their duties and royal responsibilities, taking the time to sleep in, pick up a hobby, or meditate.
Interestingly, to some at least, this act of certain war met no consequence. Some guess the status on the aggressors remains in large part a good reason to not to go war with one another. None of the families caused the conflict between the Ululu royalty and the Tymopys so no grievances between families actually occurred.
This as a surprise vacation in Logan Steel’s case, he not only doesn’t need a vacation in the cells of a dry dusty world – he intended on taking one elsewhere with more moisture – but he also doesn’t wish to be sleeping in. Carmine, who watched guards drag Logan’s crumpled body gently from the bottom of the stairway, towards the double doors across the hall from where he folded in on himself, finishes his observations. Instead of following them, or filling his mind with plans to keep Logan safe, Carmine pivots and leaves to the lobby in search of his rifle. Usually it rests on his back, sealed to a strapped holster wrapped around his chest and waist. Equipped with other armaments, Carmine relies on the rifle like an extra limb. Or an extra spine, that he can pull out on a whim.
His visors scan the foyer, the two parallel staircases winding like a tail to the top where a balcony rides like a headband across the width of the room, and three entrance floor doorways lead elsewhere, however, his visors pick up an anomaly in the pattern of those doorway placements. Stepping with the smug confidence of a thief, Carmine presses a hand against a wall where an archway could be, and feels relieved when it faintly clicks on the other side, slides open into the wall revealing a small nook where his rifle lies.
It’s unheard of for thieves to have implants – stealing them, certainly – but in these cases, it’s advantageous. On the other hand, elite guards almost always have implants, especially Logan Steel. Logan’s implants are many, some to keep the biological adaptive injections of nanobots working so he remains immortal, while the rest serve as tools for his work. Extraneous implants, like those behind his eyes feeding false information to his visual cortex, serve only to make surviving the long lie easier and less lonely. His eyes register everything as Human eyes normally do, contorted, skewed, and raw. That information then becomes revised passing through his optic nerves as his implants imply any species that isn’t Human is in fact – well, in false – a Human. This allows him to ignore the reality that very little species look Human. Surely the pigment of what they would call skin might represent those Logan remembers as Human, but most are translucent blues, or greens, or purples, or a myriad of colours all trying to be one colour. In the Rekkel case, gold with various dull hues. Raforthe and certainly the others of her title might glow with sheer brilliance, that guards or lowly others might twinkle slightly. Dull most other times.
Cracking against the airy stone a few times dislodged the implant visually manipulating aliens to appear as Human as possible. Once against the dyed window, and a further few more times against the floor, concussing him, with the weight of the half shard melted engines digging into him. More than that, the graft giving him analytical insight through his helmet also shattered. No longer able to aggregate data a computer only could.
Seeing aliens as Humans lulled Logan into a sense of relative calm. This is important to understand, because as Logan begins to wake up, he blinks into the unmasked face of a woman dressed in the most fashionable Finhen leathers one could steal, silk shirts bundled like petals to a tall flower, short brown hair kept beneath a leather cap that holds blueish visors now bending and snapping away from a middle-aged face that expresses prying questions, like:
“Really? Taking a nap now? I mean, I get it, royal victim of capture and possible trip to the long truth. Best thing to pass time is to sleep. Oh, wait, your head, it smacked a few times against those pretty floors and reinforced window, didn’t it?” She props the door open lazily with a boot, glancing down the hall, continuing, “Yea, that’s gotta be why you felt like sleeping. Well, none of that anymore, get up! Time to leave. What’s-her-ugly is pretty mad. Mostly because I tied her cloths in knots while she uh, rested.
“Listen, I’m sorry for stealing your ship, and making them think you were with me, can we move passed that please? This place is boring. I don’t care about that box. And like you know, I’ve got a bounty on my head, staying in one place is the opposite of smart strategy.” Unmodulated, more woman than man, her voice rattles in his brain the way his numbing implants bounce from nerve to nerve. Smashing his senses like the ruby and emerald wines of Huvar did in his long research days.
Without thinking much of it, Logan stutters to a shaky stand, rubbing his eyes which causes him to curse Lords of virtues he’s forgotten, as blood stretches as red as his sight on his gloved fingers. He knows then the implants breaking injured his eyes, giving him a thudding headache with each blink. Gaining his balance with a rigid hand against a smooth stone wall, he climbs up to the door, a meter above the rocky floor, pushing passed into the hallway burgeoning with the sound of silence. It’s cold in the passages, because he happens to be in the basement. Ceilings crouch down on him, within arm’s reach of ground rock and granite, smoothed and radiating cool air creeping from the walls.
The center of his chest, where a semi-holographic, semi-hard-light computer system whirs, dresses him in warmer clothes at the tap of his palm and gulping pained thoughts. Sinews of light wrap around his arms, legs, chest, and neck until they tighten, become dense, and fill with the colour of that of the beasts of Bnork in their grey tipped brown furs, their green blood-shot stomach lines Logan’s back. Now, looking feral in light construct furs that vibrate to keep him warm, Logan looks around, asking:
“You with the thief? Look similar, two of you?”
“Did that hit screw with your memory? Also, can I have whatever implant that is. Not that I wouldn’t steal nice clothing, but I can think of a few uses.” The woman, who by now is obviously Carmine, the galaxy’s greatest thief, says as she pokes at the fake clothing. “Can it refract light as well?” Her unmodulated voice carries the laughter of her youth however far away that sits in the depths of her memories.
“Enough, where’s Carmine?” Pictures of the thief swim in his mind, mix with the current version now standing less than enthused at his side. Grasping only barely ideas leading him to understand his lonely implant shattered into nerve cutting pieces at the end of his fall.
“Logan, come on, this is boring me, let’s go. Your ship is still outside.” She trails off into what-ifs on the matter of his ship’s location.
Logan grabs Carmine by the shoulders, blinking at her, grimacing as blood drips to the floor from his cheek.
“Ok, by Themalclys sea, I get it. Your weird implants screwed with your brain. What’s wrong with you?”
“Look similar, can’t be you’n ‘nother thief. Can’t be two thieves. Two of me? Can’t be two of me.” Logan steps down the hallway, it feels like the right direction. In fact, it isn’t, but Logan will find out soon enough, around the time he comes to understand the truth about Carmine.
Foundation sifts shapes of basins for Rekkel houses, like fingers or roots they dig in and carve land into a pool they use to build upwards, so the whole collection of houses look a bit like a tree, with the thick and thin claws of rocks and stone grabbing hold of the dirt and soil, as it rotates and pirouettes to a point under thin clouds of whatever moisture bleeds from the bowels of R43. Buildings on R43 don’t grow, however, instead the collection of magnetically charged rocks meld together to create pots that those living on R43 take as placeholders for their houses. Larger collections are taken as royally decreed land, while those smaller, more singular fused rock formations act as points of contention for smaller, thinner houses to rouse over.
As Logan reroutes into the neighbouring passage to the ground floor of the main house, he glances often at Carmine, who feels like every stare is a slap or cold stab. This carried on until Carmine waited for him to turn around again, where she slapped him.
“I don’t know what your problem is, Logan Steel, but you’re going to have to cut that out before I get annoyed.”
Logan, not wanting to look her in the eyes, hasn’t figured out what to think about this. No longer alone, the last Human in the galaxy, there is another, and she’s a galactically hunted master thief. With a preceding reputation. One that doesn’t escape him as odd that never poured into conversation with his colleagues or employers.
“Gift from Huvar’s family. Helped for a bit.” He murmurs.
“What, the eye thing? Who cares? Can we keep walking out of here? The guards aren’t going to sleep forever. I steal, killing isn’t entirely my thing. But neither is getting caught.”
“Y’know, waking up, Lord a long while ago. Couldn’t rest about Earth. Consoled me about it best they could of course. Was found on Huvar, figured best they could do for me was make things easier. Just fifty light years from where Earth might be. But all they did after hearing it vanished like the others was make me see Humans.”
“Big deal, that’s a pond of distance. So, what, you haven’t seen another Human in,”
“Over six hundred years.” He finishes her question in a droll, headache knocking tone.
“Huh, talk about a dry spell.”
“Pardon?” Logan coughs the word out, and Carmine points to the walls near the exit.
“What the Rekkel uglies call an unexplainable dryness in a season. Seems clear to me, their planet is always dead and screaming dry.”
“Right.”