Ascension Read online

  Ascension

  Warpmancer Books 8-9

  Daughter of Mars

  Conquest

  Nicholas Woode-Smith

  Copyright © 2019

  Warpmancer

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Website: nicholaswoodesmith.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1.Home

  Chapter 2.Interxeno Relations

  Chapter 3.A Red World

  Chapter 4.Memory

  Chapter 5.Torment

  Chapter 6.Where I belong

  Chapter 7.Frontier

  Chapter 8.Friendship

  Chapter 9.Family

  Chapter 10.Sacrifice

  Chapter 11.Fading

  Chapter 12.Justice

  Chapter 13.Fear Itself

  Chapter 14.Trial

  Chapter 15.Sacrifice

  Chapter 16.Beginnings

  Glossary

  Note from the Author

  Chapter 1.Dawn

  Chapter 2.Unwelcome

  Chapter 3.A New Zona Nox

  Chapter 4.Introductions

  Chapter 5.Demons

  Chapter 6.Keep your enemies close

  Chapter 7.Excursion

  Chapter 8.Crusade

  Chapter 9.Battle of La’rz

  Chapter 10.Melancholy

  Chapter 11.Visions

  Chapter 12.The Red World

  Chapter 13.Academy

  Chapter 14.Honour and Freedom

  Chapter 15.Break the Chains

  Chapter 16.Butterflies

  Chapter 17.Wildfire

  Chapter 18.Trust

  Chapter 19.Spontaneous Order

  Glossary

  Note from the Author

  Book Eight of the Warpmancer Series

  It is the 36th century and humanity has spread across the stars. Through the centuries that humans have explored and settled space, humanity has become friends and foes with many alien races.

  The alien exanoids have always been staunch allies of humanity, but more than the mercantile pig-men inhabit humanity’s capital - Mars. Refugees from the Imperial Council, edal and ulyx, find haven on Mars, where they can escape persecution by their totalitarian government.

  Re’lien en Xerl is one of these edal.

  “Home is always in your dreams. It doesn’t matter how far you go, you always return home when you sleep.” – Gutruktrok, Squogg Dream Psychologist.

  Chapter 1.

  Home

  Re’lien tasted blood.

  The salty, metallic taste of her own essence. On her lips. In her mouth, congealing around her broken teeth. The enforcers dragged her across the gravel. Her knees scraped. Blood stained the stones. She had seldom screamed when she was tortured in the past, but she wanted to now. Her body seared as it was dragged over every sharp piece of gravel. Countless bruises flared up, making her vision blur. Her head was on fire. All those many times before on Xerl, Re’lien held on because she knew it would end, but this was unending.

  The Imperial Council could not be defeated. No hiding. No running. No resisting. It was safer when she was just the Devil Child. At least then, she was an important scapegoat for the Imperial political machine. Now, she was just a rebel, awaiting her execution.

  The enforcers threw her to the ground. Gravel bit into her hands. She gasped and blood fell from her mouth. Her vision blurred and then cleared. There was a puddle just a metre away from her. Her mouth felt like iron and sandpaper. She dragged herself to the water and stopped. There was a figure in the water. A reflection, but it was not her reflection.

  An edal man. Black, short-cropped hair. A sad face, with a deceiving smile, covered in blood.

  Kei.

  She was Kei.

  She wasn’t allowed to drink. The enforcers picked her up and placed her on the chopping block. An edal who she had never met, but filled her with hatred, lifted her head. He spoke Edallic, but she didn’t understand. She recognised the words, but they meant nothing to her. He spat. His spittle clashed with the pooling blood. He lifted a crystalline knife and held it to Re’lien’s…Kei’s forehead.

  A traitor’s execution. You kill the mind, you kill all capacity to rebel. Kei had felt nothing. Re’lien somehow knew that. She felt the knife sink its way deeper and deeper into her mind. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t. The knife went deeper. Kei’s world went black. He was freed. Re’lien squinted at the knife between her eyes. Blood pooled over her vision. The pain didn’t stop.

  It never did.

  

  Re’lien awoke in a sweat. She hit her head on the low-roof of her bed-pod. This morning, instead of the hard geradite roofing, she was met with a plush embrace. She had installed the pillows above her last week. The creds were already worth it. Re’lien discarded her synth-fibre blanket and sat on the edge of her bed, covering her face with her hands. She didn’t cry.

  The dreams came every night. She had been on Mars for years now, but she had never truly escaped Xerl.

  Golden light shone through the window. Short seconds of shadow were followed by whizzes as hover cars shot by. A bird chirped by her windowsill. It was building a nest out of Zerian energy bar wrappers and offcut chemwheat. Re’lien looked up as it tweeted, moulding its findings into a comfortable shape. It was making a home.

  She had made a home. Well, she hoped she had. Re’lien stood up, shaky, and ambled towards the wall opposite her.

  ‘Basin,’ she said, her throat dry.

  A metal basin formed from the silvery nanite walling and filled with water. She washed her face and took a few sips. Sweetened. She grimaced.

  ‘No sugar. Just water.’

  The AI that controlled the nanite-robotics of the apartment tried to adjust to everyone’s preferences, but they inevitably got something wrong. Just because she liked sugar in her coffee didn’t mean she liked it in her water.

  The fresh water returned and she drank.

  Her reflection caught her and she stopped drinking.

  Black hair, worn down to her shoulders. Dark green eyes. Smooth, blue skin. The faint lines of scars. Two, pointy ears. It was her. Not Kei. Re’lien. Edal immigrant on a human world.

  Did Kei ever make it to Mars?

  In all the years Re’lien had lived here, adapted to survive here – she had never found out.

  ‘But why do I still think about him?’

  ‘Invalid voice command,’ the smooth, synthetic voice of the smart-wall said.

  ‘Shut up. Dismissed.’

  The nanites formed back into the wall, like sand blowing away in the wind.

  Kei was gone. He had used her. She should be over him. She was over her father. Her mother. Even Roryx…but only a bit…

  So, why did Kei torment her still?

  Re’lien sidled over to the window and gazed down at the bird. It stopped to stare at her, tweeted and then continued its work. She smiled. She liked it when animals weren’t concerned by her presence. It meant they had never been hurt – had no reason to fear.

  She looked up and examined the scene before her. Hover cars of varying brands and models shot past. Most were Obsidian. Sola, Re’lien’s sister, owned an Obsidian HC-Magnus-X. Good car, she was told. Obsidian was the only manufacturer worth the creds, everyone told her – except the other megacorps salesmen. Below the cacophony of mini-warpdrives, stabiliser buzzes and exhaust fires, was a street market filled with a
n assortment of edal, ulyx and humans. All manner of tech, food, books and entertainment apparatus were for sale on these streets, located in syn-run stalls and exhibition areas. The non-human inhabitants of this block were enterprising. Most of them were entrepreneurs, scholars and inventors. They were not welcome on their homeworlds. Like Re’lien, they were considered heretics by the vast and brutal Imperial Council. The Imperial Doctrine despised change. Peace, order, purity. That was all they cared about, damn the costs. As a result, the intelligent, the wilful and the principled of the Empire flocked to Mars. So many of Re’lien’s kind had arrived on Mars that a spontaneous neighbourhood had formed in New London. Fredala. It started as a joke. Free edal. It caught on. Re’lien liked it. She had escaped Xerl for freedom. Being a free edal was something to be happy about.

  Life on Mars, for the most part, was good. Well, anything after Xerl was good. She wasn’t beaten every day of her life and she wasn’t permanently scorned by her fellows. Humans, and the assorted free races that gathered at the capital of humanity, deified progress and commerce. Roryx would have liked it here. Re’lien always saddened when she remembered the ulyx. She didn’t know why. He had betrayed Kei. But…Kei had betrayed her…

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  Re’lien jumped, startling the bird. It flew away, but promptly returned, cocking its head as Re’lien hastily fidgeted with her wrist-tab.

  ‘I hate this thing,’ she muttered, tapping her skin where the nano-computer was meant to be located. As she found the right patch of skin, a holographic screen popped up. Her desktop wallpaper was an artistic rendition of a scene from her favourite v-flick – Roses from Venus. The militaristic and high-energy society of Mars didn’t like the slow-paced period drama about the early settlers of Venus, but she couldn’t get enough. She had almost failed her first year in Intergalactic Relations after binging it. It had been her first v-flick – a series linked right up to her mind, where she could experience sight, sound, taste and smell. If she so wanted, she could even inhabit the point-of-view of any of the characters. She had already watched it as Darzy and his strong-willed wife, Jean.

  A message notification popped up. An alarm.

  ‘Skite!’ she swore, very human-like. Swearing had been the first thing she had learnt in Standard Terran, thanks to Eri. She gazed at the time. She was late for class. She looked outside. The traffic was too heavy.

  ‘V-link attendance today, it is.’

  Re’lien didn’t like attending class by v-link. Once, the Network was overloaded and she was answering questions half-an-hour after they were asked due to lag. She’d have to risk it. She couldn’t be late – especially for her sister’s class.

  Professor Sola didn’t much care if someone missed her lectures, but she did notice – especially if that someone was her younger sister. Re’lien didn’t like missing classes at the best of times, but she didn’t want to give her sister reason to worry.

  She lay down in her bed pod again.

  ‘Deploy MindBand. The new Grag-Tec one, not the Aegis piece of skite you keep popping out.’

  A green-headband popped out of the wall by her head. She lifted it off its stand and placed it on her head.

  Three…two…one. She took a deep breath and embraced cyberspace.

  “As a squogg, I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin. I mean this literally as well as figuratively. Our bodies are falling apart, after all. But it’s more than that. Our society is so restrictive. We have to wear these embalming-suits from birth, but they aren’t our only straitjackets.” – Yukrekt, squogg refugee living on the human core world of Orion Prime.

  Chapter 2.

  Interxeno Relations

  The blackness dispersed as the fist-sized hovering syn located in the physical lecture hall of the University of New London scanned the room and its inhabitants and fed the stimuli back to Re’lien. The class was filling up with all manner of attentive scholars and the droopy-eyed that managed to persevere through the years of study without ever seeming to pass an exam. Sola had not arrived yet. The wooden desks of the lecture theatre were arranged in a semi-circle, forming an amphitheatre around the lecturer’s holo-screen and podium. Re’lien took a deep breath and the syn activated its smell sensors. Mahogany. Re’lien smiled, internally. She had no body to smile.

  Activate holo-reality avatar.

  The syn constructed her avatar, shooting out light as it hovered towards a vacant chair. The flying drone sprouted arms, legs and a head. First, low-res and uncanny, but as Re’lien sat down, the hologram was completely accurate. Scars and all. Many people constructed their holo-reality avatars to be more attractive, without blemishes – how they would like to be. Re’lien felt that was dishonest. An avatar, especially a holo-reality avatar, was for convenience, not deception. Re’lien always scanned her self-perception into all her avatars. She had nothing to hide – not anymore, at least.

  The lecture theatre filled up with physical students and a few holo-syn drones. A few of the holograms were sluggish, laggy. Some of the students were off-world, but still needed to attend the class. Most of the students were human, as would be expected on a human world. Among them were a few exanoids, a gray, an enque and a merka. Re’lien had thought that Interxeno Relations would be a popular course among the alien immigrants on Mars. Rather, the course and the greater faculty of study, Intergalactic Relations, was taken by humans seeking to get involved in the Trooper Diplomatic Corps or corporate diplomacy.

  ‘You’ve learnt your Standard well,’ Sola had said all those years ago. ‘What do you want to do with it?’

  ‘Read,’ Re’lien had replied, a book in her hands.

  ‘You can’t just read. You need some sort of goal. A passion. The intel you and Eri sold to the Order will keep you comfortable for a while, but it won’t last forever. You need a game plan.’

  ‘What did you do when you arrived?’

  Sola looked away, reluctant to speak. ‘I…don’t remember. But I can tell you what I’m doing now – I’m reading, learning, teaching and researching. Intergalactic Relations is a growing field and who is more appropriate to teach it than a first-generation immigrant from humanity’s enemy?’

  ‘What do you do in Intergalactic Relations?’

  Sola had looked Re’lien in the eyes. ‘We stop wars.’

  Re’lien completed her primary schooling in less than a year. It was more a formality than a necessity. Re’lien had been schooled in the basics of being a functioning being, and she had good common sense. Most of the schooling was just assimilation to the Martian lifestyle. And history. A lot of history. History that made Re’lien feel guilty – even though she shouldn’t. It hadn’t been her at Ganymede. She hadn’t killed over a billion human civilians. But people like her did – and that is why she tolerated the glares.

  After that, she wrote the entrance exam to the University of New London to study Intergalactic Relations. She applied everything she had learnt from her primary schooling, her brief chats with her busy older sister and most importantly, from her time with Kei and Roryx. She passed and completed a year of study, no thanks to Roses from Venus. In her second year, the Trooper Diplomatic Corps offered her a bursary. They would pay for her studies, a nanite smart-apartment and base living costs, and she would serve in the Corps for three years after she completed her studies. It was no sacrifice for her – she had wanted to join the Order since she arrived on this planet. If they were the ones who managed to keep the wonders of Mars safe, then regardless of her distaste for the rampant militarism, she would serve the Order. This was now her final year, and exams were fast approaching.

  Re’lien awoke from her reverie as a paunchy man took his place by the podium. Re’lien’s hologram raised its eyebrow.

  Sola is absent? Might as well have bunked.

  Re’lien thought this, but the truth was that she genuinely did enjoy lectures. This wasn’t just something to appease her sister. Re’lien genuinely wanted to find ways to end conflict – and to do tha
t, she needed to understand it.

  ‘Good morning, class. I am Professor Ndandwe Garcѐ from the Diplomatic History division. Professor Sola is currently running a seminar at the Diplomatic Corps in Cape Nova. Usually, the class would have been cancelled, but as we draw closer to exams, that becomes imprudent. So, I will be filling in for Professor Sola.’

  Re’lien had been lectured by all manner of academics in her studies. In general, they fell into two groups: the enthusiastic, and the bored. Prof Garcѐ seemed the latter. His eyes drooped permanently as he rattled off about some history relevant to Interxeno Relations. Re’lien had heard it before: the first contact between humans and exanoids in the 30th century.

  ‘Human explorers from the United Space Exploration Initiative, leading the charge for human exploration beyond Great Terra, warped into the same gravity well as exanoids on a similar mission. As strangers are inclined to do in a galaxy such as ours, both ships opened fire.’

  Some exanoids squirmed. They didn’t record it that way.

  Garcѐ grinned. All human historians loved this story. ‘This was the first time exanoids and humans had ever encountered each other’s weapon technology, and our shields reflected each projectile. At an impasse, the ships attempted to make contact. Eventually, the humans and exanoids found commonality in mannerisms, tones and sounds. Years later, the Standard File was released – a definitive lexicon allowing for the translation of Standard Terran and Eral’a. But even before the full translation of each other’s languages, our people maintained peace. How?’

  An exanoid named Yuu in the row below Re’lien’s put up her hand.

  ‘The Great Exchange.’

  ‘Standard Terran, here, please.’

  Yuu grimaced. She had spoken Standard Terran. Garcѐ wanted his term for the Great Exchange.

  ‘Commerce?’ a human named Bruce von Staxton offered. Re’lien repressed a sneer. Re’lien had no real reason to dislike him, beside the usual petty competition that was so common among scholars.