Mindshard (ON HOLD)

Chapter 4: The Pax

     Vaughn smiled.

  “You sound almost envious, Cienisar.”  She quietly noted, looking over at the lattice from which the Indurin’s AI was speaking.

  “Envious?”  Cienisar snorted.  “As powerful as a Vuzhahn-class AI is, they don’t have the opportunity to fly, like I do, traveling the interstellar void to behold such wonders that the very imagination is boggled by them.”

     This time it was the lean marine colonel that laughed.

  “Something, I’m sure, they think about.”  She said.

  “And why not?’  Cienisar quickly replied.  “I would, if I were them.”

     With Galus Traffic Control bunching the flotilla up into a tight knot to prevent them from wandering too far into intersecting flight paths, the Indurin and its companions navigated ever closer to actual Galus orbit.  From his position on the bridge, Deks watched as they slid through traffic stream after traffic stream, carrying goods and personnel back and forth from the massive orbital stations called sky nodes, each nearly a tenth the size of Galus Prime’s moon.  Possessing seven of the massive nodes in orbit, Galus Prime was a centralized control and distribution nexus for the entire sector, governing the portion of the Pax bordering unclaimed space between the Pax and the Directorate on the Arm’s outer rim.

     Then the Indurin shifted to port, enough that it was noticeable despite inertial dampening and flux field control.  A glance over at the Indurin’s captain, a venerable Sidhe from the golden race that first greeted the humans on Ikaris 7, her blonde hair mostly silver, yielded her giving the commands to establish low orbit.  Nodding in satisfaction, Deks made to leave the bridge.  Time to retrieve his surviving human and ferry her down to the surface before anything else happened!

     Once again one of the silvery shuttles that took her and Finn from Ikaris 7 to the Pax flotilla on the edge of the Venda Lassitus system, was pressed into service to take them down.  Their destination was the Isivir complex just outside of Galus Prime’s largest city, Ven Cor’brin; an organic cluster perched on the line where the rambling Cor’Asel Forest met the Sea of Brin’adar, a place of wild beauty and stormy natural power.

     As they had on their way out from Ikaris 7, the shuttle’s walls went transparent as it descended through dense cloud cover towards Ven Cor’brin, letting Vaughn gasp at the beauty of the purplish peaked Mountains of Silver that ran like a line down the coast towards the city.  On their eastern slopes sprawled the Cor’Asel, a dense, temperate forest that covered a good portion of the continent with its pristine shawl of verdant life.  To the west the Brin’adar clawed incessantly at the stony coastline, attempting to reclaim that which the sea yielded up long ago to plate tectonics and volcanism.  And there, on the tip of a terse peninsula, caught between forest, mountain and sea, was the city.

     Dropping closer, Vaughn watched the city grow beneath them.  The first thing she noticed was that the center of Ven Cor’brin was dominated by skyscrapers that seemed to reach higher than the mountains that loomed at their back, challenging the very clouds for supremacy in the sky.  And they weren’t like the skyscrapers of New Angeles or the cities of old Earth, glass and plasticrete behemoths that lorded Humanity’s ability to conquer nature.

     No, they were graceful needles, impossible curves and airy domes, structures that denied the laws of gravity and the protocols of engineering, intertwined with the sylvan tendrils that reached into urban space from the surrounding forest.  In fact, many of the buildings were sheathed in growth, sides and roofs home to miniature forests of their own, shaggy cloaks of evergreen and seasonal deciduous that nearly buried the artificial structures beneath living hills.

     As for the rest of the city, it was lost under the forest’s reach, hidden from view by massive boughs of green.  Then they were past the city and heading out over storm-frothed water, the coast being pounded by a late season squall, towards a rocky island some five kilometres offshore.

     With rainwater pouring off the shuttle’s hull, the craft flitted over the waves, rose slightly to clear the island’s broken shoreline then slowed to drop into a cleared area protected in the lee of a craggy jut of weathered stone.  As it descended on silent waves of energy, landing legs were extended and it alighted quietly onto the rocky ground.

     Vaughn nodded and made to stand out of her seat.  They were down and, by all appearances, they were about to make a walk through the rain to whatever hidden facility they had landed by.

     Before she could move, however, the ground beneath the shuttle shifted fluidly, as if uncertain about its own makeup.  Then the shuttle was dropping through it, the stone suddenly liquid, allowing them to pass through its midst without effort.  Thankfully the shuttle’s walls had become silver again, sparing Vaughn the disconcerting vision of watching once solid rock flow past them like water.  Within a moment, the shuttle was smoothly swallowed up, leaving no trace behind.

     Downward the journey continued for a handful of seconds before they once again came to a halt.  This time Vaughn could hear the purr of equipment and machinery all around them, loud enough to penetrate the shuttle’s hull, the decking humming beneath her booted feet.  Then Deks was stepping out of the flight deck towards her, a broad smile on his face.

  “Welcome to Viper Island, the Isivir’s primary training facility on Galus, Colonel Vaughn.  Here we will begin your incorporation into the Pax’s covert intelligence and operations agency.  Ready?”

     Vaughn smiled thinly and bobbed a curt nod.  She wasn’t really ready.  She was a soldier, not a spy.  She favored honor and decisive action over sneaking around and attacking from the shadows.  But if working with the Isivir would accomplish what they had to, then she would do it.  Because duty was just as integral to her nature as honor and action were and she felt duty-bound to do what she could to insure the Directorate’s interests were served.  She just hoped it didn’t get her killed.

     At Vaughn’s nod, Deks activated the shuttle’s outer airlock and, after it had moved out of the way, they stepped outside and Vaughn became the first human to step on the surface of a Sidhe world in the entire history of the Pax.  The moment, however, was quickly lost; with nary a pause, Deks hustled Vaughn down a curving ramp that reached up to the shuttle’s airlock and out of the small, yet tidy bay the shuttle found itself in after its downward journey.

     A brief stop in the chamber attacked to the bay’s airlock saw a decontaminating bombardment by several waves of unidentified energy, each sweeping over the two of them in a silent rush of color and sensation.  Then they were stepping through the fitted doors at the chamber’s far end, the two sleeves sliding effortlessly apart to let them pass over the threshold and into the Isivir base itself.

     On the other side a tight cluster of Sidhe from all three races met them, a serious lot in dark clothing.  Despite their grim appearance, Deks smiled.

  “Ah, your evaluation team, colonel.”  He looked over at Vaughn.  “Here we go!”