Peril in the City
Chapter 1:
I counted as I breathed, the rifle steady in my hand.
One.
My target drifted through the open and empty plaza at a slow pace, unaware of my presence.
Two.
Deathly silence filled the air as my finger began to press down on the trigger.
Three.
A sharp crack echoed off the slate-gray walls around me. The ethereal creature faltered and dropped to the ground, oozing blue ichor. Its tentacles stilled. After the sounds of the shot faded into the distance, I scrambled up from the rubble pile I’d hid behind and ran towards my prey.
I was close enough that the sprint didn’t last long. As I ran, I yanked on the straps on my back, freeing a makeshift sled. It clattered to the ground. I took a quick glance each way before beginning to fasten the dead creature to the contraption, making sure to only touch it with my gloved hands.
The ethereal glow slowly faded out of the creature, leaving a bluish-gray lump of flesh covered in a layer of mucus. It slithered in my hand as I tried to grasp it.
I gritted my teeth. I was out of cover. I was going too slow.
The last knot fell into place and I snatched up the cord attached to the sled. I pulled the sled out of the plaza, the wooden planks softly scraping on the ground.
It was a long way back to camp. A long time to wince from my scars and worry about the future.
I didn’t know if the creatures we’d encountered in the ancient city were edible, but we were out of other options. Canned food had disappeared from the wreck of the Destiny. Outraptor meat had been exhausted. I’d even scouted the crash sites of the frigates that had engaged us a month ago, to no avail. To be sure, I’d found plenty of corpses.
We weren’t that hungry yet.
I kept a watchful eye around me for anyone that heard my gunshot, or the sound of my sled. Every damn sound carried for miles in this cursed city. I fully expected to be ambushed at any moment.
From time to time, my fingers drifted to where the upper part of my right ear used to be. I still had phantom pains. The rest of me had been more seriously injured, but it felt strange to know that there was a part of my body that I would never recover.
I heard a sudden rustle from the street ahead and immediately ducked into cover behind a nearby support pillar, freeing myself from the sled and unshouldering my rifle. I panted.
I drew in one deep breath and peered out from behind the pillar.
Another of the tentacled denizens of the city drifted by about fifty meters ahead. It gathered loose rubble from the street and passed the debris into the center of its body. The gray stones shrunk inside the beast’s central chamber, crumbled apart, and finally liquified. The creature floated away silently, its chamber filled to capacity.
A massive shell hole scarred one of the nearby towers. The creature raised its tentacles to the jagged surface and blue liquid spewed forth onto the surface. The beast’s tentacles shaped the liquid like an expert mason, crafting the substance into a muddy froth that solidified back into slate-gray stone. The hole still was not repaired, and the creature floated off to search for more material with which to repair the damage.
I sighed. Hardly the worst thing I could meet.
I shouldered my gun, and took up my cargo once more.
***
It took a couple of hours before I returned to camp. We were situated inside one of the vast, empty skyscrapers that were indistinguishable from each other, well towards the other side of the city. No damage had been done in this area, and so the tentacled beasts were vacant for the most part.
My caution eased somewhat as I saw the concealed barrel of another rifle poking out of a window on the second floor. It didn’t track me. I wondered briefly which one of my comrades was on watch duty.
There were no doors to hold open as I hauled the sled into the colonnade under the building, and then through one of the entryways into the building proper. Any marvel at its multi-pronged silhouette had been lost over the time we’d spent here. When I reached the end of the hallway beyond, I called up the titanic stairs at the end, “Some help here?” and leaned against the wall to catch my breath.
I heard heavy boots. They were followed by the appearance of Yuri Aldarin, his face ashen-gray at the prospect of digging into my catch.
He didn’t waste any time helping me drag the sled upstairs while I pushed it from behind.
The antechamber beyond was lit only with light from the triangular windows. Our carbide lamps were long since used up and discarded. A darkened figure stirred from the shadows as we walked up and greeted me timidly, “Welcome back.”
I nodded in reply to Dr. Ininsir, and pushed the sled towards the center of the room.
“I see the hunt was successful.” Ininsir’s hand went up to her face.
Tian’ Xi stirred from her place at the window, walking slowly over to the rest of us. “You’re really going to eat that, aren’t you?”
I stood up, my back popping as I did. “Yes. And you will too if you want to stay alive.”
Tian’ Xi said nothing as I began cutting away the tentacles from the body of the creature and tossing them to one side. My theory was that the tentacles contained stingers or perhaps a delivery mechanism for the blue gel that had disintegrated some of the Destiny’s crew on our trip up here. If we got truly desperate, we could cut the backside of them off, maybe boil them. The most edible meat was likely contained within the beast’s center of mass. I cut into the central part of the creature, avoiding the stomach-like organ that still contained blue gel.
As my dissection continued, the group stood around me, looking down on the procedure.
“Mind the central gut.” Dr. Ininsir observed.
I shot her an annoyed look.
“Sorry.” She said.
Yuri’s hands went to his hips. “You know, it might taste like the seafood from Ijritan. It’d need a bit of spice of course, but it might not be that bad...”
“Did you see any of the others?” Tian’ Xi asked.
I sliced off a chunk of fat-like substance. “No.”
“Interesting.”
“I was moving as quietly as I could.” I held up a hunk of the creature. “Yuri, the bone.”
Yuri moved towards the wall and retrieved an outraptor femur that had been filed to a point. Moving swiftly, he skewered the meat in my hand as I held it up. We carried it over to the meager wood pile in the other room, with flint and steel next to it. We propped the bone up on two others over the fire pile and set the wood alight.
As fluid began to leak from the meat, I held a metal cup over the fire, attempting to catch the liquid. The meat’s outer layer turned from gray into a brown papery substance. The fatty substance underneath solidified like an egg being cooked.
Tian’ Xi sat down on the stone floor, orange light illuminating one side of her face as she glowered at the fire. At long last she spoke, “How can we make them put their differences aside? They were all one crew once, when Nome was alive.”
“They betrayed her.” I noted calmly.
Ininsir broke in, “Tian’ Xi is right. We’re not going to survive this if we can’t reunite the crew somehow.”
I crouched down, my voice slowed by hunger, “If you want to try approaching either of their camps again, you’re well within your rights. You’ll get yourself killed, but I’m not stopping you.” I glanced up, “Anyhow, who says we’re getting out of here?”
Yuri slumped against the wall. “Please don’t say we’re going to be stuck here until we die.”
“We are.”
Yuri buried his head in his hands.
I looked over at him, my mood softening. “Hey, we’re going to be stuck here until we die. I didn’t say we’d die soon. I’m trying to make sure of that.”
Tian’ Xi’s voice was bitter as she spoke. “We need a plan. We need to do something. We can’t just sit here and...”
“Survive?” I looked back at her. “I think that’s the best thing we can do right now.”
“I can’t… I won’t...” She growled out.
“This is our home now, for good or for worse.”
She glared at me.
I sighed and sat down. A flicker of a thought went through my head: what would Nome do?
She would look at it through their eyes. One month with no reliable source of food or water, scraping by on what we could scavenge from the carcasses of fallen airships. An alien landscape. The constant threat of being killed by the city’s native inhabitants if they changed their neutral mood. Never being able to go back to their homes. Stranded. Marooned.
I spoke softly, “I know how you feel.”
Tian’ Xi’s scowl relaxed. “Not as much as you might think. You don’t have a home to go back to. And you’re used to scraping by each rhythm.”
“You’re not wrong.” I mused. “But I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life up here either if given the choice. Believe me, if there was a way we could return darkward, I would. I want to see the Beltlands.”
Disbelief was still evident on Tian Xi’s face, but she didn’t pursue that conversation. My gaze shifted from her to the doctor. “If you were one of the crew, would you believe us? What possible hope can we extend to them? From their perspective, they’ve known either the chaplain or doctor Hennir longer than us. They’re more trustworthy. If that means they have to shun some of their former shipmates, they’ll do that. They’re not going to pool their resources if we don’t have a plan that they can back.”
Dr. Ininsir frowned. “We don’t have to have a plan! This is about basic survival!”
“They don’t see it that way.” I shook my head. “I’m sure that Dr. Hennir believes she can activate any Forebear technology in these ruins somehow and save herself that way. I’m equally sure that Zealot believes he can pray the River’s salvation into existence. Their followers are just waiting to be saved.”
I looked at her pointedly. “Besides, we can survive on our own.” I tried not to pay attention to the cognitive dissonance of saying that while sitting in front of food that I wouldn’t otherwise consider eating in a thousand years.
I sawed off a chunk of the meat with my knife. It really was just us four. I had hoped to find Evinsir at least and pull him into our group, but he had vanished. The rhythms felt very lonely with just the four of us. At times I would wake from visions in my sleep and find myself pondering the city alone. Wondering if survival was worth it.
Then I would think back to Dostwickr.
In her last moments, she’d found a way to escape the pain she was in. The hopelessness of her situation. I couldn’t follow her.
I held the molluscan meat in my hand. I wrinkled my nose. Survival had to be worth it.
I bit into it. It was rubbery, slimy, and bland. Overall it was disgusting, but not as disgusting as it could have been. I grimaced. “Tastes like egg white.”
Yuri laughed weakly. “Some funny egg whites you’ve been eating.”
That was enough to get them focused on the meal. Tian’ Xi took an extra knife and cut into the flesh, portioning it out to the others. We sat there in silence for a while, the sound of fat and protein being chewed echoing through the room. A sunbeam blast would shoot down from the city’s ceiling at times, passing through a vertiginous distance of space to heat a spot on the ground for a brief few seconds before petering out. Thankfully there were many floors of shielding between us and the roof.
Dr. Ininsir finally broke the silence. “I knew Dr. Hennir for many years before this expedition. I can’t believe how much she’s changed. She never once gave me any indication she had any motive other than to further the cause of science.”
I wiped my mouth. “People hide their true self all the time. Some are better than others.”
The doctor shook her head. “What if… What if she’s somehow being affected by the lightrot this far sunward?”
“Wouldn’t we all be?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps in different ways? I just… she’s not the same person I once knew.”
“She got hit in the head with a lightening bolt.” Yuri mused. “That could have made her all wonky.”
“The change in her behavior did happen at that time.” Ininsir’s voice faltered.
“How often does lightning cause someone to change?” Yuri inquired.
Ininsir wrung her hands. “I don’t know… I’ve never heard of a case where someone’s personality changed as much as hers has if indeed it’s the result of that lightening strike. Some strange cases of altered perception have happened. An individual once received sight back after being hit with a lightning bolt. But a total change from her previous personality? I don’t know. She needs some kind of psychoanalytic help.”
I tossed another wood stick into the fire. “No doc. What we’ve seen of her is her real self. People can hide that for years.”
Dr Ininsir furiously shook her head. “That can’t be true.”
“Is it rational to deny that?” I glanced at her.
“She isn’t… a bad person. I can’t believe that.” I saw tears begin to form at the edges of her face before she quickly wiped them away.
I poked the fire. “How about this: maybe she still is the same person, but all of her negative traits have been stretched out of proportion by stress.”
“How do you figure?”
I sighed. “It makes perfect sense to me that she would split off from the chaplain’s group. She doesn’t want to be loaded down with what she views as religious nonsense.”
“I’m not just talking about that. When we left the Destiny, she had shut me out entirely. It was as if I didn’t exist. She pushed me aside whenever I tried to ask her anything. When I pleaded with her to open up to me, she...” Ininsir curled her arms around herself. Her brown hair had long since become greasy and tangled from our extended time out in the city. Her field jacket had almost been completely torn to shreds. She looked pathetic.
“Sounds like an obsessive to me.” Yuri offered.
“You had to know her like I did. She could be obsessive yes, but never so cold. She would have gladly shared any of her scientific discoveries with me before this expedition. She’s become so cold...”
“It’s not worth dwelling on.” Tian’ Xi finally interrupted. “Haye’s right about one thing: if we try returning to either of their camps to reason with them again, they’ll shoot at us again like they did the first time. You can’t give her any psychoanalytic help if she needs some.”
I arose from my sitting position and walked over to the window. We’d had some variant of these conversations for many rhythms now. They always ended the same way. Without her laboratory or indeed any of her books, the doctor was almost useless at figuring anything out about this alien city that might improve our situation. Getting the rest of the crew to pool their resources made the most sense, and especially getting the chaplain and Hennir to set aside their differences and pool their knowledge also made the most sense. After multiple attempts at approaching both camps, we’d all but given up.
I had many times wondered if I could approach the city center again, but I wasn’t so foolhardy as to go into the presence of that tentacled army again. They still hung like a hundred arrows in the air over anyone who wanted to approach where the Ultimate Truth had been. My fear got the better of me.
Perhaps we could have reactivated it somehow. The great beam of light at the very sunward pole of the world had diminished and finally vanished mere hours after the three groups had split at its base. The city felt empty without it. I wished to the sun that it would create some semblance of order in the images I’d experienced inside. Perhaps with that knowledge we could somehow have figured out how to leave.
Or maybe if I could find Yensir… He had to know something more about this city. The whole expedition had been his backers’ idea anyhow. Some conspiracy had coalesced to send this expedition out here for… something. I didn’t yet know what.
When we’d encountered the ancient beings on the other side of the sunward ocean, one of them seemed to know Yensir at least.
The conversation continued behind me as I gazed out on the city, my eyes drawing grid after grid on the city streets.
“What would you do if you were able to return home?” It was Yuri’s voice.
Tian’ Xi answered, “After the Aery were notified of the ship’s demise? I would look for another command.”
“I’m never setting foot on another airship ever again.”
“Most of the time things like this don’t happen. Even combat is rare. Most of the time its the order of the rhythm. The rush of the air alongside the ship. I’ve been up in the air so long that being grounded like this is strange to me.” I heard her sniff something, possibly the tin mug I’d collected the creature’s juices in. “And you?”
Yuri’s voice was tired. “I don’t know. Yin was gentrifying. I might go and see the Beltlands with Haye.”
“What about you Ininsir?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to go back to Inninger. That was always the plan after this expedition. Anything’s better than here.” she replied with distress.
“With Yuri’s snoring, aye.” Tian’ Xi poked.
“I do not snore!”
“You do! Quite loudly I would add!”
“Do not!”
“Absolutely do! I’m surprised this building doesn’t come crashing down on us from the sonic vibrations alone!”
I heard the doctor’s distress transform into muffled giggles at their antics.
Suddenly I wasn’t listening to them argue. Out the window, I’d seen a small shape limping in the distance. I hid myself against the window’s left side. “Shhh!” I called out insistantly.
The conversation behind me ceased. “What do you see?” Tian’ Xi queried, fear reaching into her speech.
I motioned with my hand for the spy-glass we’d taken from the Destiny while keeping my eyes on the target.
A hurried succession of footsteps behind me followed as Yuri stormed into the other room and retrieved the tool. I head Tian’ Xi grabbing both rifles and checking their chambers. Yuri practically slammed the tool in my hand and took up a position on the lower edge of the window. I put the glass up to my eye.
It was far off into the city. I didn’t even know how I’d managed to catch sight of the figure at this distance. I blessed my luck and my sharp eyes. It stumbled, Its leg bloodied, leaving marks as it went. I couldn’t see its face; it was obscured by a rag tied around and under a leather cap. The rest of the figure was covered by a common airman’s uniform.
As I watched, it turned, looking for some invisible pursuer.
A tentacled beast loomed suddenly out from behind the next street, and I saw the figure rush into the building whose side its path had hugged. As it did so, I saw the flash of something metal in its hand.
Was it a derringer?
I blinked and tried to reacquire sight on the figure, but it was gone.
“Haye? What is it?” Yuri whispered.
“I don’t know.” I answered. The beast drifted by on the street where I’d seen it, and it was as if nothing had ever been there. “Someone.”
“A scout from the others?” Tian’ Xi asked.
“Maybe.” I let out an anxious breath.
“Who else?”
I lowered the spy-glass and slowly contracted it. My eyes narrowed. Could it be that I’d caught sight of Yensir after all this time?
Yuri looked up at me questioningly. “Haye? Who do you think it is? Is it a scout?”
“Is it someone from the frigates we downed?” Tian’ Xi’s grip on her rifle tightened.
My voice filled with determination. “Only one way to find out. Everyone grab a weapon and come with me.”
Commentary:
In this chapter, we are introduced to our group of survivors one month after the Destiny crash-landed at the sunward pole. They aren’t doing too well, resorting to hunting the jellyfish that populate the city for food, and scraping together what they can from the crash sites in the city. In the dialogue, my intent was to create a sense of the desperation and tension that this extended stay is taking on the four. Tian’ Xi, being the naval officer that she is, is trying to keep the wheels in her head turning for a way out of the situation. Dr. Ininsir still feels denial about her former mentor’s shift in personality. Out of the four, I would characterize Tian’ Xi and Dr. Ininsir as being in the most denial about the situation, whereas Yuri and Haye have come to some form of resignation. Yuri is probably still stuck in the depression stage of grief.
The quartet is interrupted by Haye catching sight of an unknown individual she thinks could be the long-lost Yensir, who she originally discovered was an agent sent by a secret organization known as “The Five” for unknown purposes to the sunward pole. Haye’s hunt for Yensir should make up a good part of the first third of Heaven’s Sojurn.
I’m considering removing the hunting scene at the beginning. While it does serve an important role in making the reader jump into the story immediately, it may suffer from “prologue-itis” - the tendency of prologues to be non-useful in inserting the reader directly into the narrative. It describes a certain action, and what the conditions are outside of camp, but it doesn’t result in interpersonal interaction that is more likely to gain the attention of a reader.
Likewise, I rewrote several sections of dialogue in this chapter because I had a hard time finding a good flow stringing it together. The conversation moves from topic to topic, and finding a way for different characters to try and find nuances in a hopeless situation was hard. In a way, it breaks some of the rules of storytelling, where you want your characters to take action in order to be interesting, not react to events. Here, I think it’s justified since its relatively brief (one chapter), and a realistic depiction of our heroes being out of options.
I’m most proud of my removal of a lot of passive voice constructions since I wrote the first novel. That was a huge problem in my early writing that seems to have disappeared for the most part. Let’s hope more beginner’s stupidity falls by the wayside as I continue!
The World of Sunlock:
The airship Destiny and its crew belonged to an organization called the “Aery”. While it might sound like an air equivalent of a nation’s “Navy”, the Aery is actually a mercenary organization comparable to a private “air navy” with elements of medieval knightly orders thrown in. It is headed by a grandmaster in Basilica City, close to the Ambrosian Unknown Sea.
Ostensibly one of the missions of the Aery is the reformation and rehabilitation of society’s dregs through discipline and a common dedication to the well-being of their ship. For the most part, the Aery is successful in these endeavors, and has honed the breaking down and building up of character to a fine art. Not every case is successful, but the Aery’s track record is solid enough that an airman with at least five to ten years worth of experience in the service is viewed more positively than someone who has an average track record of social vices.
The Aery is financed through several contracts with different nations to augment their air power, as well as by the bank of the Basilica. Since the Obeashid – the Basilica defense forces – regularly contract a large portion of the Aery’s firepower, they are sometimes also referred to as the Basilica air force. The Aery does not accept contracts that involve the use of force against the Basilica, which adds to this perception.
Heaven’s Expedition Agent Update:
So far, only Jennifer Herrington at Harvey Klinger Literary Agency has received a query letter this week.
The list stands at two agents so far. I know I’m going slow. Give me some time. It’s scary reaching out to people. :P
P.S.
Sometimes, I feel like I haven’t done enough in a given time period to satisfy my internal quotas. Take the above example of writing only one query letter this week. Partly that’s been due to my ongoing job search, but its also been due to overhead from other sources, including laziness/fear of rejection.
When I feel as if I haven’t met all of my deadlines, I have to realize that I’m human, and that I can’t always meet 100% of my goals every day of every week of every month. There is a lot that has to be done every waking moment, and only so much time to do it. That’s hard. And when humans meet hard things, we’re going to fail sometimes. In fact, we’re going to fail a lot. To quote Picard, “that is not a weakness, that is life.”
So take a moment if you feel too harried or like you aren’t living up to your own expectations, hug yourself, and tell yourself: “You’re doing what you can. Let’s continue forward.”