Interzeit: A Space Opera (22 page)

Deimos speaks to him. It
’
s night, a long cold one, its voice winds its way into his mind. “They” have finally decided to move ahead. Everything was now past the point
of return. An automatic process,
the machine was now powering up, and moving into place.

“It’s time Kales,” Deimos says, “Beauty and Warfare have called,
twin
leviathans that have given us life, we now answer.”

“May the future justify our
terror.
”
Kales mutters
, sitting up from his “sleep”.

He begins readying himself, the vastness of what must be done,
it now cannot be stopped
all will be exposed. His mind flashes back briefly to what “They” showed him, what “Deimos” showed him.

“It’s time,” they all say.

Nol
felt sick through the first test calibration on the lunar surface. Testing for errors or damage during transit, they had him run through some basic exercises that the other factions had already s
et up, and been using for the
cooperative training program.

“It’s just in your head,” Clara reprimanded him.

“That doesn’t make it less real,” Nol complained as they banked into a sharp turn around a burnt out ship.

They put
EDF
-01
through its
paces,
the
y performed admirably
given that they had been calibrated for use in the atmosphere of Earth. He was curious to speak with the other pilots, but everyone unnecessary had been removed from the test site, a so called measure to preserve the test’s “integrity” as Ophelia put it.

They had some
small durable targets downrange
. Hi
tting them was amusingly simple
to Nol. Clara and Nol quickly
battered
the tiny objects with the rifle in consecutive repetition.

“Check out those crater patterns Clara,” He mutters between controlled breaths.

“Around the target?” she asks, “What about them?”

Nol shakes his head, “
Another pilot here must have bad aim
, that’s all.
J
ust
forget
it
.”

“Forget what Nol?”

Nol continues retraining his aim, and firing in silence until they finally call it off. When he returns to the base everyone on his
attaché
is beaming at him warmly. He reports to the main observation chamber, Ophelia embraces him lightly, clasping his arm.

“Well done Nol,” She says,

“Well done
!” Clara whispers in nasally mockery somewhere in his mind.

Looking at Ophelia, her eyes grown impatient for a response, he is lost in an argument with Clara’s wavering presence in his mind.

“Nol?”

He snaps to, “Yes! Thanks,”

Her face reads with worry, “Perhaps you should see someone, still feeling sick from the shuttle launch?”

Nol nods passively. Not long after he does the flood gates open all around them. People in uniforms he neither cares for nor recognizes enter the room
.
A
n array of faces and ranks congratulate him in varying flattering and back handed ways.

“I have to admit it was a tight performance, no frills.” Plaskin flashed as she greeted him.

Nol responded
to all of them with the same
passive almost apathetic thanks. It was not until a familiar face a
ppeared on the scene that he perked up a little
.

S
he
noticed
him
immediately
, seeing
him
besieged on all sides by technocra
ts.
Lei
gives
a light wave,
but walks away disinterested, sitting in the corner away from the noise.

Abruptly Nol pushes through to join her. The crowd
reacts,
drifting with him towards the corner until Ophelia mercifully takes control.

“All
right, he’s had a long journey. P
lease
, please
he needs some rest in order to get into FULL fighting shape.”

The comment is enough to break their hold on him and he slips away. Something about being near her made him feel better, Clara’s endless looping network in his mind seemed to slide away into a sleeping region, dying down and down to
a
thin presence.

Lei
greeted him again,
winding through the polite series of tropes she was prone to asking in her own
alien
rigidness.

“Feeling any better?”

Nol laughs, “Not at all, how do spacers do it? Its just go go go, right? I need some time to just…”

“Relax?” She asked,

He agrees, “How about you? Things have been quite chaotic on world and off, you must being under a lot of pressure.”

She laughs and agrees in turn, “Something you get used to,”

“How long do you think we’ll stay here?” Nol asks.

“Until the number crunchers think we’re ready.”

Nol shakes his head dismissively, “I think something’s up,
I
can feel it. It’s muted here, but on Earth everything is charged up like a battery.
We’re
all here for more than just good faith, and exhibition.”

He feels the emotional impetus to continue when a girl enters. She is only a minor distraction, but when Lei’
s gaze is
also
drawn to her, he does a double take
. She scans the room frenetically, eventually stopping with her sights trained straight into Lei.

“Sato!”
Lei waves
her over.

She smiles a toothy grin, and rushes over in high spirits. The smile seems pinned to her dimples by a magic force, her teeth clenched as though resisting a deep incorrect joke.

“Hello Lei,” she dips her head informally.

Iza’s attention instantly turns to Nol, “So you’re the prince Lei was so worked up about?”

Nol flushes
lightly in confusion
, Lei s
tands to greet here
.

“Uh this is the Lunar Protectorate pilot, Izanami Sato, please forgive her bluntness.”

Nol recovers, standing to greet her, “I’m Tomson Nol, the Cabinet’s pilot elect for Earth.”

“Oh…” Iza looks at Lei with a sinister look, “I’m sorry, very nice to meet you Tomson.”

She grabs his hand, shaking it in a terse aggressive way. Grabbing around his fingers by the ends, preventing him from getting any grip. She clenched her hand trying to crush them, but her weak grip only succeeded in extending their handshake much past a socially accepted amount of time.

Eventually she starts laughing, and he pulls his hand free quickly.

“So what did I miss?” Iza asks,

“We were talking about relaxing.” Nol says

“Well-
“ Lei
gets in before being overrun,

“Were you now?” Iza drowns her out, “Well what do you think Lei?
Should we take the Earth Bumpkin to relax somewhere in the shit heap?”

“Iza…”
Lei responds
, “It’s his first night here,”

“
That’s okay
” Nol says, “
T
he Cabinet Liaison
is going to
mandate some bedrest anyway
.”

“What I meant, is that you shoul
d drive us to Kovskygrad.” Lei blurts unexpectedly
.

Izanami’s
razor
sharp grin returns
with reinforcements from the back. She hums light muted laughs to herself,
some bizarre memory
trying to escape into the outside.

Finally, “Fine, but if we go to Kovskygrad, I can’t promise we make it back in one piece.”

Nol’s eyes narrow, “Being whole is overrated.”

They make a hasty exit once their plans are finalized. The insane cacophony of Iza’s laughter quickly
infects
Nol
, its amplified to the degree that even Lei finds herself
caving into the reckless mania
.

Nol
butts heads with Iza over driving the craft, especially once they
make it to the open moonscape
, coursing freely over the empty
timeless land. They quarrel fiercely, feeding off each others aggression.

“You’ve never even driven one!”

“I’ve been driving my whole life!” He protests,

“Sims don’t count, you Earth fucker!”

It goes on and on until Nol finally buckles under Iza’s iron will. For his trouble, she does perform however. The craft dances and banks with all the grace of a swan with one clipped wing. They slap the bottom of the hull harshly on the surface. She repeats this error a few more times to the increasing consternation of Lei.

In an ever expanding series of fibonaccian curly Q loops,
they fractal their way to Kovsk
ygrad in the time it takes for their handlers to realize the full scale of their sudden disappearance. All of their ionics flash and vibrate in erratic panic as the top
brass
try frantically to establish their whereabouts.

“We should probably answer,” Lei says,

“Eh, they can track us if they want to find us.” Iza says.

“No Lei’s right,
”
Nol
says,
“
I’ve got this,
I’ve
got a way with people.
”

Nol
answers his wrists, pulling up a video screen of a very perturbed looking Ophelia.

“Nol…” She says, giving him a full on withering of a look.

He pastes on a pastiche frown, shame look,
pilfered
straight from his past experiences and grafted on.

“I’m sorry Ophelia,” He says, “They kidnapped me, I had no choice.”

“What?!”
Her voice booms audibly throughout the cabin.

Lei leans
over face clenched in a nervous smile, “No no no, no kidnapping!” She says, “Just fun!”

Iza leans back, leaving the navigation up to fate or the computer, whichever caught on first.

“A little kidnapping,” she hums, “Tinsy bit, no big deal!”

Nol looks at them for the next cue,
then
turns back to Ophelia’s face, which is being crowded out with a multiplying hydra of bureaucratic faces and scowls.

“Uh, gotta go! Don’t call me, I’ll call you!” He throws the window into the dash, and it shatters into a cascade of filtering light and prisms, blowing away into electronic dust.

“What are the chances that they’ll come get us?” Nol asks,

“One hundr-Defin-Percen-tely” His two companions blurt into each other.

“So we don’t have much time,” Izanami grins, taking a sudden turn, “I know just the place.”

They ditch the car short of ent
ering the full interior of Kovsk
ygrad, the amorpheous, yet rigidly geometric monstrosity of a building. She cited the “shit traffic” inside as the reason, but her insistence on abandoning all
of
their most
traceable
electronics in the craft, left some room for disbelief. Lei hesitantly agreed to leave Basil behind.

“He’ll keep our stuff from being stolen anyway Lei,” Iza beamed, “Come on!”

They run after Izanami’s nimble frame, as she scampered around to a plaza entrance on a particularly small rhombus jutting out of the main form of the complex. Nol and Lei give chase and follow her in.

The interi
or is strange, the inside is
larger than it appears outside, the ceiling and even the walls have an illusionary quality to them. The light bends along the surface, seeming to pull flat walls into curves, stretching and pulling at the space inside.

There’s
Earth
made of
light dancing through the fake night sky above them. Escalators, lifts, turns, stairs, ramps and other pathways branch off wildly into different directions. The onyx tiles change to soft red grass mid-stride, and the interior metallic parts melt away into some kind of dreamed diorama of nature made unnatural, made weird and
scintillating
to the nerves.

“Where are we going?” Lei says finally,

“Wait!” Izanami spreads her arms wide, all three of them crashing to a stop. Her eyes scan the technowooded realm for something yet undetected, her finger searches through the land, finally coming to a stopping point.

“There!” She shouts, pointing to a small cave looking entrance
,
hidden behind the gnarled roots of a great tree.

“Is that it?” Nol asks,

“Not really
!” She runs into it, squirming through the roots, and disappearing as soon as she touches the cave’s threshold.

Lei disappears
similarly
, Nol struggles through in pursuit. As soon as his feet touch the stone, the world behind him vanishes, and he finds himself back with them. They are in no forest or cave now, but a moody
red
lit interior, people drinking and smoking substances of all origin and effect, sitting around cushions, aligned along the straight axes of bars
,
milling around tables and the floor with little discretion.