Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (16 page)

Some more daring souls even pressed their hands into the glass.

Sar saw this and turned to Quavoce. “I dare you to do it!” she said. He laughed and shook his head, but To-Henton was already pressing his hands through the transparent shield. It gave like a viscous bubble, revealing a translucence of water but a consistency of mercury.

Quavoce and Princess Lamati watched as Henton’s hand reached the edge of the mercury-wall and popped through.

He shouted, “Holy crap, that is hot!”

And they all laughed as he withdrew his hand quickly. Of course, he had no more put his hand into the star’s heart than they could really look upon its fury without being consumed by its very gaze. But the simulation was a deep one, and one that begged to be explored, just as the matching one below them, the Under World of the Translation Party, promised to be as well. As many already went to investigate the darkness of that world, Sar was still fascinated by the fires of this one.

“Quavoce,” she said again, laughing with excitement, “have you no courage? Will you be outdone by your Eltoloman cousin?”

Quavoce laughed with the madness of it, and looked at his friend To-Henton, who was surveying his hand as though he expected it to be singed. But it was not, of course. These fires were meant for fun, for the conquering of fear.

Sar Lamati’s eyes were afire themselves with rare beauty and zest. She looked at them both as if she was about to burst with anticipation, then she whirled on the wall and with a great cry of excitement she flung herself at it with all her might.

They started with surprise, and several people around them began cheering, some maybe even recognizing they were near such celebrities. She clawed and dug at the wall and the cheers became louder as more came to watch.

Quavoce and To-Henton looked at each other. They knew that nothing in the simulation could cause you actual pain, let alone any physical harm, so if she could break through the wall … well … then she could. They shrugged, and then threw themselves to her side to help her, digging their hands into the thick, gloopy substance as well.

She laughed as they joined the fray and the shouting around them redoubled, word of their identities rippling through the gathering crowd to add to the excitement of it all.

The heavy substance that made up the wall started to give in pulled chunks, warping outward as they dug into it like a forming bud. As they rended it, the wall started to creak around their fingers and the fire behind it started to swirl in a massive eddy, as if in anticipation of the coming fracture. A part of Quavoce’s mind worried that they were breaking it, that they were breaking the simulation. But that was the difference between Quavoce and Princess Lamati. Where others saw the plethora of rules that governed society, she saw only one, a question: can I get away with it?

And she could. She most definitely could, and with a great heave of the three rulers, the thickness of the bubble at their fingertips started to come back, and with a suddenness the fire was leaping through it in a great font, opening up a hole as wide as a person.

Princess Lamati was taken up in the hot flow first, washing downward into the great cavern at the head of the great snaking line of liquid gold that was suddenly flowing into the space. Quavoce was not far behind, nor was To-Henton, swept up in the hot rush as they were taken on a wild roller-coaster ride across and through the mile-wide party space, weaving between groups of revelers who whooped and hollered as they went by.

Many leapt into the flow as well, enjoying the hot baptism as they were pulled along in an insane conga line that defied any semblance of gravity and wove this way and that all the way across the great cavern, before coming to ground on the far side of the great space, splashing into the wall and back out through it.

As the fire departed the space once more, it gently flung first Princess Lamati, then Quavoce, and then To-Henton out across the glassy wall like they were on ice, and indeed, after the heat of the fire-slide, the wall was like ice, bathing them in cool salve as they slid across it, laughing ecstatically.

They looked up. The slide they had opened up still flowed, snaking beautifully all the way across the massive space from where they had released it far away on the other side. It would continue to flow for the length of the party. They could see people merging with it now, flowing down in it, and then being thrown free, just as Quavoce and his friends had been, sliding this way and that away from where the great fire exited the magnificent party space.

Quavoce fought genuine attraction to the woman who had started the flow, and noted that others were even now trying to open up new slides. She was a leader, there was no doubt about that. She had been born to be one. The problem was not whether she could lead, but where she would lead you if you chose to follow. Destruction was the probable answer. Not hers, just yours.

But she was leading again now.

“I want to see the Under World. Which one of you will take me?” she said, introducing a competition where there was no need for one.

Quavoce looked at To-Henton, who assumed Quavoce would not take up the princess on her offer, and saw the Eltoloman was about to speak, and not without a certain cockiness. But Quavoce surprised them, and even himself.

“I will take you, Sar,” Quavoce said, bracing himself against the wall and taking her hand.

She spun to face him, shocked by this new Quavoce. Then he added, “You too, Henton, if you can keep up.”

And with that he pushed off with all his strength, adding momentum to the propulsion that his will naturally gave him in the space.

“Come on, Princess!” he said with a rare audacity, and she responded by entwining her arms and legs with his and adding her forward will, and they surged upward, darting this way and that.

To-Henton was hot on their tail, but again Sar impressed Quavoce, for instead of merely flying around the eddies of partygoers filling the space, she began kicking out with her feet and arms, pushing the partygoers off and giving them greater agility than will alone could have. He recoiled at the act at first, thinking it brash to kick away from people so violently. He tried to tell himself that she knew it would not hurt them anyway, but in truth, most were very excited to have been kicked by such a famous person, and once more they were the source of cheering and revelry as they flashed through the crowd.

They approached the center of the space. A miniature black hole, swirling, and drawing in those that chose to veer too close to it. It was the doorway to the second party space, and given Quavoce’s ebullient mood, Sar Lamati was keen to get him into the blackness, and maybe into the hot embrace he had avoided for so long, the only man she had ever sought who had dared to refuse her.

To-Henton saw it too, and as he wondered whether he was about to lose both a friend and a lover, he careened into a particularly large group of Yallans. They were respectful, and even happy for the intrusion when they realized how influential the man who had just bowled into their midst was. He begged forgiveness and quickly excused himself, but as he did so he saw that Quavoce and Sar Lamati were gone, vanishing quickly into the darkness.

Interval E: The Ball Rolling

The blackness was all enveloping, more a thickness, a presence, than a lack of it, but only because of the keen awareness everyone had of the throng of people dancing around them.

A pervasive music filled the space, everywhere and yet nowhere. It was within the dancers, not without, all heard it, but all were aware that what they heard was within their own bodies, a thumping base beat that thrummed through them infectiously, filling them with rhythm. Outside was only the void, silent as a vacuum. You could only hear someone if they touched you, as if the sound was transmitted through their fingertips.

Great circles formed, intertwining with each other, chanting viral beats, amplifying the rhythm and building it into something close to ecstasy.

The only light was a tiny speck of a sun, so distant as to seem almost irrelevant, and giving off no light into the space, only that which spoke its presence, an exit at any point you might wish it, but nothing more. Around you, sight was a lost thing, conspicuous in its absence. All was anonymity, all was touch and sound and smell, as infinitely intimate as it was utterly devoid of identity or race.

Somewhere in the crowd Sar Lamati had, for once in her life of privilege and power, forgotten her status and her standing, and wanted only one thing. In the heady madness that was the translation celebration, Quavoce had finally succumbed, both to the darkness and to her implied offering, and she clung to him like they were alone, no different from the writhing, dancing, jumping throng that surrounded them.

As they united, they began to sink into a floor that became, at their wish, cool and liquid, soft and caressing, and fell into the lower reaches of the Under World, beneath the endless dance floor, where gravity was once again forgiven. Their breaths, like those of others lost in the darkness, came anomalously through the black liquid coolness that enveloped them, as though in a dream.

The party swayed on and on, as people met and parted, sometimes deliberately, sometimes with deliberate anonymity. But many among them moved with purpose. Many came into this dark underworld to be alone in the void and lose themselves in the dance. Many came with a special someone, and still others came here to meet someone, special or otherwise.

But some had come here to fulfill a less personal need. They had come to talk.

Not with words, for those would be heard by the Arbite, who listened even here, recording anything that was said between members of different states, with impartiality but also with absolute access. But touch, that was a different matter. To record such things would be a crassness that would not have been tolerated, especially during the celebration, a fact that certain high Council members somewhere in the darkness were relying on even now.

And so these agents came close, these seemingly irrelevant junior officers of the Lamat Empire and the Eltoloman, and they exchanged details via coded taps to thighs and backs. Only summary details, of course, this was but an overture, an offering and a request. A would-you-mind for a maybe-we-could-discuss. But it came with an implied truth: we are willing to talk. And that was really all that either party needed to confirm.

The only other detail that needed to be covered was one little, logistical tidbit. When? If they were going to do it, when would they look to make their move? At what point in the coming conflict would they look to dispose of some of their less worthy allies?

- - -

Elsewhere in the ether, as hundreds of thousands danced and laughed and rutted, some more private parties were kicking off as well.

Marta had been required by decency to attend the main banquet before the translation party. She had even enjoyed some of the interpretations of Earth cuisine, even if their attempts at Mobiliei’s own diverse delicacies had been generic at best. But once the translation had come and the party had become more … enthusiastic, Marta had excused herself, using the black hole at the center of the Upper World to disguise her exit.

As she entered the virtual vortex, she simultaneously translated out of the party to a more exclusive event being held by one of her colleagues.

The setting was predictable perhaps, for a location of a Nomadi Alliance event, but then their love of the ocean was not feigned, as any other contrivance would be. Marta arrived on the scene like the others who were already here, stepping onto the deck of her own ship, a ship of the line of a hundred guns.

The sails were already set as she arrived, and as she surveyed the scene she saw that they were even now breaching a headland. The Bay, thought Marta, Fral did love the Bay.

She smiled as a virtual first lieutenant landed at her side, leaping from the rear upper gun deck as he saw his captain emerging from the ship’s saloon.

“Captain, we are entering the bay now!” he said briskly.

“Yes, we are, aren’t we,” said Marta, smiling broadly. Her hand went to her side almost without thought and confirmed that a telescope hung there, as it should.

Shouting as she bent at the knee, she called to her lieutenant, “With me, Lieutenant. I want to get a look at the proceedings.” And with that, Marta leapt lightly into the rigging and began swimming up the mass of ropes, reaching up into the heights of the great ship’s masts.

The lieutenant, younger than Marta and with the stronger legs of a male, quickly caught his captain with a series of practiced if daring leaps from one side of the rigging to the other. Indeed, he caught up with her and then he overtook his leader. A lesser captain would have expected her junior to slow and let them win, but Marta appreciated the art of the climb and the once great athleticism of her seafaring ancestors, and knowing this, the constructs aboard her ship held nothing back as they echoed the acrobatics that the Nomadi sailors had once been so famous for.

She smiled as she heaved herself up in her own fashion, not as spectacular as the lieutenant, perhaps, but still with an agility that she was proud of. She could not hurt herself here, of course, but she could hurt this simulated body, and any injuries sustained in the battle sim would last for its duration. She had discovered on many occasions that a pair of broken legs made the job of captaining a great battleship problematic, at best.

“Smartly done, Lieutenant,” said Marta, as she used her greater upper body strength to heave herself up over the edge of the bird’s nest atop the main mast.

“Thank you, Captain,” said the lieutenant, wisely not offering to help her, an offer that would have brought him a sharp clip upside the head, or at least a stiff rebuke.

She settled herself against the windward side of the mast as it bucked and swayed beneath her, the hundred-foot metronome giving amplification to an already stiff sea, even at deck level. She braced her legs around the stout wood and retrieved her telescope.

She was here at this event to meet with five others. Five other conspirators, to be exact, and though they were here to talk business, they would take the opportunity to enjoy the construct Fral had created first. They would be together soon enough, and would discuss what they needed to discuss aboard the victor’s ship.

For now, they would fight. Fight like their ancestors had. Fight with the skill and verve that had made them at once the sworn enemies of the their land-based cousins and a force that could resist domination by those same gluttonous land-lovers.

“I see Fral and ILyo are already at it,” smiled Marta, as she squinted into her glass.

“Yes, Captain,” said the lieutenant, “and the Pulujan siblings are coming up hard into the mix, too.”

“Oh good,” she groaned, “no doubt they’ll come in together under some pretense of an allegiance, then turn on each other like always. Yes, look, see how Elder is even now backing his mizzen, just a little, but enough to fall behind.”

“Yes Captain, no doubt he looks to let his sister get bloodied in the fight first.”

“Indeed, and to also try and keep upwind of her for when they inevitably come to blows with each other.”

“Shall we close with them, Captain?” said the lieutenant, hopefully. “See if we can prod them a little?”

“No, no. Set course to stay downwind of them, I’ve gotten tangled up in one of Fral’s Bays before. Let them duke it out to stay upwind. We’ll batter them from here, forcing them up into the bay, and into the shoals I know are waiting for us there.”

She studied the sandy coastline in the great bay that was to be their battleground. Like always with the Bay simulation, the wind was brisk, true and off the shore. That gave the person farthest into the bay the advantage both in terms of maneuverability and range. But it was a trade-off; try to dominate the Bay and it may come to dominate you. For though the simulation was familiar, the shoals were not, they varied with every battle, and even Fral, who was hosting this little tryst, did not know this bay’s channels and reefs.

“And anyway,” said Marta now, turning completely around to look astern, back around the headland they were now clearing, “we are not the last to arrive, and the fraternity of Pulujan pals has just entered from around the far headland … which means …”

She smiled coldly. “… Ralfy, there you are!”

“By the Great Winds!” exclaimed the lieutenant at the sudden appearance of the last combatant.

“Sound the call to arms, Lieutenant,” said Marta, lowering her telescope. “Prepare for battle!”

He was already leaping from the high platform, a hand grasped around the rear stay his only concession to something close to sanity. But it was how they used to do it, thought Marta, never ceasing to be amazed by it as the virtual officer slid down the great rope cable to the rear deck, releasing his hold while still about twenty feet from the planking and landing with practiced ease.

She shook her head at the sight and watched as the main deck below became a hive of activity around the officer and his subordinates. She stole one more glance astern as the sails of the last great ship arriving for the battle hoved into view, then she braced herself and leapt out as well, grabbing onto the backstay with a scream of excitement.

Let the battle begin.

- - -

She had turned into the headland, a move that had cost her every bit of her maneuverability, but it had also forced Ralfy to wait precious minutes before he could clear the headland and bring his guns to bear. That had allowed her to get off a full broadside volley into his rigging before he had even fired a shot out from behind the rocky promontory that demarked their little playfield.

It had been a low blow, or rather a high one, that had cut half his lines and riddled his sails with hot shot, not much in an actual battle, given the might of the great ships, but it had set the tone for their short but bitter battle, and had swung the advantage to her.

It had been bloody, but after twenty minutes of close quarters pummeling, she had finally crippled him and he had lowered his flag and stepped below. His ship’s part in the battle had been done, but his own was just getting started. For as each captain lost their command, they became a crew member of the victor, and now, through the magic of the simulation, he emerged from a hatch in Marta’s deck marked for just this occasion, his captain’s uniform replaced now with a lieutenant’s.

“Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Ralfy!” she said, beaming, and he bowed backward, gracious to the last.

They greeted each other with genuine affection, clasping arms and touching their left feet into each other’s right shin like the old friends they were.

“My rigging, Marta? You cut my rigging? Bit desperate, don’t you think?” said Ralfy with look of admonition.

“Ah, ah, now, Lieutenant, that’s
Captain
Desperate to you.”

They both laughed and he turned to the greater battle still raging deeper in the bay. Now that he had been defeated, Ralfy’s only chance at any redemption was to help Marta win, and therefore keep his lieutenant’s ranking, rather than the ever more menial titles he would have if his new ship was destroyed as well.

“I see the Pulujans are still friends,” he said with amusement.

“I know,” agreed Marta, “I think that is a record for them.”

They both walked to the windward rail to look out at the remaining combatants, her ship already beating hard to join the fray while the sad remnant of his settled and was battered ignominiously by the rocks of the headland. His crew had not suffered, indeed they had not actually existed, and the ship’s hulk was empty now, anyway.

It would have been a sad sight if anyone had been watching, but all eyes were ahead as Fral also finished off ILyo’s ship with a final, well-placed volley right into her stern gallery, the iron flying the length of her decks and all but wiping them clean.

But ILyo was no fool, she had seen the writing on the wall and had made one final, but crucial, decision.

“ILyo is a smart one,” said Ralfy. “She’s scuppered Elder Pulujan.”

“No doubt. Brilliant even in defeat,” said Marta with admiration, seeing the results of ILyo’s final maneuver. Trapped between Fral and the oncoming Pulujan siblings, she had been all but done. But she was not going to take her chances being second to one of the bickering Pulujans. Instead, she had brought herself around and set her course right for them, exposing her vulnerable stern to Fral, and stepping below before the maneuver was even complete.