The Ghosts of Morena-5 - Pt1

A "Shades of Vaulta" serial

Story inspired by this image - found on tumblr, artist unknown

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Morena apparently had a bit of a wind problem, or so the stories went.

We were dropping in from orbit, riding a boxy Irulian shuttle that had seen better days and finer hands at the controls. Harloc was supposedly a veteran from the Irul Regency’s wars with the Dhagi and their Kali robots, but whatever he had learnt in that disaster of a war had not translated into an improvement of his piloting skills at all. Morena’s atmosphere was kicking his ass by all accounts. He was almost too large for the pilot seat, hulking over the control arms with his tattoos visible from shoulder to wrist, and the implants along his temples were blinking frantically.

We were in good hands.

Yeah, sure.

Carla Yu was in charge, and she rode shotgun next to Harloc while facing back towards the rest of us. Pink hair, arms almost as big as Harloc, and a tank-top that made me wonder how breastfeeding worked on her world. She was from the Ferox Outworlds, so she had that coppery-orange skin they all had out there, and anyone who dared to mention that pink hair and orange skin did not go well together got a split lip for it. Mean as anything, tough as nails, hard as a duramer hull plate.

“Salvage job out in Vaulta space. We have coordinates, we have a history log, and we have this,” she had whispered, before pulling the data-chip out with a flourish. Tony’s Tank-Quila Tavern had been dark and noisy around us, so I’m not sure why she was whispering, but I guess it was part of her pitch. “Bio-codes from a tech-head who worked there. Minsorius Alectius, a Class Seven. Brain as big as big as one of these, apparently.”

Her hand had hefted one of her giant breasts for illustration, and I had nodded and said I was in, and now I was here, wondering what in the Sultan’s name I had gotten myself into.

Carla and Harloc were not the issue. Well - Harloc’s piloting was an issue, but that was not the main issue.

It was the rest of the team.

Jarl was something that had escaped from the Ganymede Protectorate at some point, and took up a double-wide crash seat opposite me. The Protectorate bred bio-weapons, which meant crossing human stock with animal stock. On paper, it sounds simple. Take a man, add some dog to make him faster and stronger, and boom - instant war-dog that could fight all day and run all night. Ideal insurgency troops when they were heckling the Vaulta borders and trying to cause trouble with the Brind League too. In reality, it was something that smelled of wet dog, had fur in all the wrong places, and was drooling down its chest. The drool lines were competing with its tongue, which was purple, prehensile, and twice as long as it was tall. It had a head that was nominally human, if you squinted and took some K-phetamines to scramble your brain first. Whoever had designed its face had not been paying attention to things like proportions or classical aesthetics.

It could speak, but chose not to most of the time. I had listened to it talking about food on the hyper-jump in, and that one conversation alone had been enough to make me pack extra sterilizers.

“What’s happening up front, Harloc? You’re making us bounce back here, man.”

“Fuck off, Hansa,” came the reply from the front. Chrome teeth flashed in a wide grin in front of me.

Next to Jarl was Aleph. He had been waiting in orbit above Tony’s place when we all met up, and I clocked him for a gun-runner from the Hanseatic Quadrarchy even before he opened his mouth. With the cyclops eye visor and the chrome teeth, they were easy enough to spot once you knew the type. Aleph had changed out two of his upper teeth for black implants, so now he looked like a gap-toothed low-born dockworker when he laughed. The rest of him was hidden in a black power-suit, and the only visible skin was his scalp - which was as bald as a baby’s arse.

That had been Harloc’s observation, not mine, to be fair. Their barbs had only gotten better from that point on, much to Carla’s amusement during the briefing and prep.

Mishra was our number six, and she made me nervous. Sitting next to her was like sitting next to a high-tension field that was bleeding ionization and just waiting to snap a lightning arc at the first idiot dumb enough to get in range. Skinny thing, all bones and stick arms in a morphed skinsuit that looked like an oil slick and moved the same way. Slanted eyes, black hair, one red eye. The other eye was a cyber oculus, all black and yellow traceries. When she looked at you with her red eye, the oculus looked away. When the red eye looked away, the oculus looked at you, spinning and winking and seeming to have a mind of its own.

It was side-eyeing me right now while she watched Alpeh. I had seen something similar once, out on the northern fringes of the No-Space, but this was my first time up close.

Weird little woman, and far too quiet.

Not like Jarl though. The war-dog was quiet because it had trouble talking, and because - I suspect - it was thinking of food most of the time. Not really something the rest of us got into at the same level that it did, with those big jaws that were constantly drooling. No - Mishra was quiet because she was hearing something else.

Tech ghosts.

I’d heard of them, people who went out into the No-Space and then got lost. Years, decades - time had a strange flow out there. The Vaulta had put up warnings and advised the rest of us to stay away, but we did not really listen that well. Now the Vaulta were gone, and we did even more dumb things. Ships went in, ships sometimes came back - and nothing that walked out of them was ever quite the same as at the start of the journey.

“What’s the matter, Aleph? You not used to a rough drop?” Carla’s voice was bemused as she tapped away at the control board in front of her. Behind her, the windscreen showed boiling clouds of azure and emerald, darkened with clots of thunder as we plunged deeper into the mesosphere.

“I’ve been in a crash landing that had more finesse than this ride.” Aleph licked at a black tooth, turned sideways to regard Jarl next to him. “What about you, big boy? You’ve probably done more drops than the rest of us combined.”

Jarl sucked his tongue back into his gullet with a slurping sound, spattering drool across most of the seats. He turned to Aleph and grinned, showing far too many teeth, and held up a distorted hand-paw with six digits spread. Something rumbled inside the beast, although it might just have been the shuttle crapping itself against some thermal outside.

“Six? You’ve done six jumps?”

“No no no,” Jarl chuckled in response to Aleph’s question. “This year. Six done.”

The beast flexed, and a dewclaw popped out just behind its wrist, black and hooked.

“Today seven.” Jarl waved his arm at Aleph, then retracted the dewclaw again. “Six done.”

“I told you he was good.” Carla grinned at Aleph’s raised eyebrow, then turned and faced me. “You, Jalal - you ever jumped before?”

“Quon Son, three years ago.” I kept my voice steady, pushed the memories back that came with the name. “Two orbital, one ship to ship.”

Aleph whistled, which seemed to startle Mishra so much that she focused both eyes on him for an instant.

Which of course freaked me out even more.

“Some mean shit, from what I heard.” Aleph cocked his head sideways, looking at me - although it was tricky to pin his gaze with the cyclops visor. “Which side were you on?”

“A side that managed to walk away. I don’t do autographs, Hansa.” My right arm rose - was that my own thought? - and gave him a raised silver finger. Mishra’s oculus followed the finger, blinked at it.

“The Jalal’s solid, don’t worry about him.” Carla was chuckling from the head of the cabin and grinning to show those perfectly straight teeth of hers. “I don’t recruit dumbasses, and everyone knows that. None of you are here to break my track record.”

I wanted to turn and ask Mishra if she had done a combat drop before, then thought better of it. If she had survived the No-Space, then a combat drop was probably about as terrifying as waking up to take a piss in the middle of the night.

“Great. Just great. So we’re all pros here, and everyone has balls of steel.” Aleph snorted, shaking his head. “I guess this will be a walk in the park then.”

“Balls?” Jarl growled somewhere between his throat and his chest, a rumble that vibrated through seat restraints and shuttle decking quite apart from the atmospheric tantrum outside. “I like balls. You have balls?”

We fell through the atmosphere, and Morena tried to shake us like something caught in Jarl’s jaws.

The Vaulta had settled the world a long time ago, and tried to tame it, but even they had been forced to adapt their original plans after a while. One hemisphere was a shallow ocean that barely reached twenty metres of depth, while the other hemisphere was rocky canyons and archipelagos with volcano chains. The local star baked the ocean into daily typhoons, which then swept across the other hemisphere in a stormfront that circled the globe in a constant rotation. No matter where you were, once the sun rose you had about two hours of light before the typhoons struck. East to west, every day, like a laundry cycle that just never stopped.

Nothing except plankton lived here, because nothing else was dumb enough to even try.

We saw the first of the Vaulta fin cities when we were just entering the stratosphere.

Kilometres tall, each fin was oriented to catch the circling typhoon front headon. It made a type of sense, the longer I thought about it: present the smallest point of contact to the winds, and let the edge of the structure catch the wind. A knife parting atmosphere, sliding the colossal energies around and past it while presenting the smallest possible cross-section itself. Anything sticking out perpendicular to that torrent of air would be destroyed in a heartbeat - but if you caught it just right, you could divert those terrible forces and safely exist in the lee.

Which was what the fin cities did, for a time.

They rose from the surface of Morena in clusters, four or five parallel to each other in little groups that looked like the fingers of a hand from up high. The belly cameras on the shuttle made them look small from our altitude, and only when we got closer could we see the clouds that wisped past below some of them, and realise how massively tall they actually were. Their foundations were anchored in whatever lay below, be it sea or rock, and the cluster we were dropping towards was on the night side of the planet, just in front of the terminus line of the coming dawn.

“That’s our target, folks. We should be landing just as the sun clears the horizon.” Carla was tapping away at her terminal again, the worst of the turbulence behind us now, and a screen came alive on the bulkhead above Harloc’s head. “We have sunlight for two hours and twenty mikes. After that, if the shuttle is not under cover, the storm takes it and no-one goes home.”

“Before we land, we have to see if the defenses are still up. You know the Vaulta, they never left things open for visitors.” Carla scratched at her pink hair with one big hand, and this was the first time that I saw her grin falter. “Time to test those codes and see if they were worth the credits.”

“You mean you don’t know?” Aleph sounded as incredulous as I felt. “We’re falling ass-first towards a Vaulta city, and you don’t know if the codes work?”

“Hey Hansa, you want to go out and be our welcoming party?” Harloc’s voice was strained from the front. Something pinged above Aleph’s seat, and the rapid-eject light came on. “I can eject you right now to go talk to the welcoming committee if you want. Give you all the confidence you need.”

“Stow it, you two. It’s Vaulta tech, no-one has guarantees.” Carla was working on her console now, eyes down and absorbed in whatever was on her screens. “I got this from a contact I trust, and his own reputation is riding on this too. If it’s good, it’s good. If it’s not, then we won’t even feel it.”

Hell of a pep talk, I thought, and turned to share a nervous grin with Mishra.

The woman was asleep, head lolling to the side, both eyes blissfully hidden. Her oil-slick suit looked dull behind the seat restraints.

What in the haram hells?

Aleph shared my confusion when I looked over, then just shrugged. Jarl, next to him, had a grin stretched across his canine features and was slowly closing and opening his massive fists to some rhythm that only he felt. Black nails flickered open in the shuttle gloom, then snicked back again. Repeat, repeat, almost hypnotic.

Some Protectorate thing, I thought, and laid my head back into the crash padding. Who knows what they taught their beasts, or what it did in those rewired and synapse-stretched skulls of theirs.

The minutes stretched out along with the silence, and I watched the camera bring us closer and closer to the target. The top of the fin city we had targeted was becoming larger and larger underneath us, and when I ran my optical scans against it, it began to draw up an approximation of the size of the structure based on the altitude and the camera angles.

About a kilometre wide, at its midpoint, with an elliptical shape that swept its leading edge back to the trailing edge some four kilometres behind it.

Height clocked in at almost ten kilometres, and I blinked and double-checked the algorithm before looking at the numbers again.

It was a pretty damn big fin, and it was only one of many on this world. The Vaulta had never been a race to stand back from ambition.

There was a layer of turbulence about five kilometres up from the fin’s roof, something that hazed golden-red around us for the duration of a long, drawn-out breath - and then Carla was swearing and slapping at the board, and Harloc was shouting, and the shuttle was upside down and falling like a dropped spanner towards the ocean below.

“Brace brace brace!” Carla was shouting as well - stupid, a part of me thought, considering we were already strapped in and hanging on - and then the shuttle was spinning again, something thumping along the belly and tail of the craft. “Decoys out, flares out, spoofer on and spinning up. Harloc, get us…”

Harloc’s reply was lost in the rattle and scream of something exploding behind us. I felt a presence ghosting along the noosphere of my implants, digital fingers raking through space where my digital mind operated, and smelled cinnamon and vanilla extract - strong, sweet, almost overwhelming - as my mental defenses flipped up on instinct alone.

Jarl howled, long and pitching upwards, and began to thrash in his restraints as if he had stepped on a live wire. Aleph, beside him, leaned back and away as the war-dog flailed around, and after the second hit from the windmilling paws the man swore something and deployed his helmet, hiding behind the black insect carapace that sprouted around his head in an instant. Drool sprayed across him moments later, and something shrieked as talons scored down his one armoured forearm.

Something clamped down on my right hand, and when I looked up, Mishra was awake and looking at me with both of her strange eyes. Her left hand was oddly warm on my silver hand.

“Have you ever died before?”

Her red eye was blue now, and she was smiling, and there were two lines of blood leaking out of her nose and down to the corners of her mouth.

“Fuck this,” was all I managed before I blacked out.

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More tales from the “Shades of Vaulta” universe: Spark-head

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