Shaft, p.8
Shaft, page 8
Not Kantenan.
“If another species comes up with a new way to mine citricite, suddenly, the Kantenans lose their minds, because they’re the only ones with the talent and the skills and the culture around the ore.”
“They are,” Olmed said.
“But they’re not. Their monopoly is disappearing, but they won’t see it. Any other group could learn how to do it. Stars, if the Mining Guild developed better techniques for mining citricite, the Kantenans would be cut out.”
“So the Kantenans innovate,” Olmed said. That had always been part of it, the innovation of their methods, in order to stay on top of the process.
To be more efficient.
Or, if Barnak was right, to be certain they remained at the top of the shaft, controlling the flow.
“They take ideas from other sources and adapt them to our process. Making sure that the Kantenans have the newest and most efficient process.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Sharing our tech with others?”
Barnak shrugged. “I’m not doing anything different than what they’re doing. Except I’m sending things out. The developers? They’re bringing stuff in from other groups.”
Olmed nodded. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Depends on you. Who are you working for?”
“The Mining Guild.”
“And what do they know?” Barnak asked.
“I haven’t told them anything yet. They have their own problems.”
“Wouldn’t be any explosions in their asteroids, would it?” Barnak asked.
Olmed stared at Barnak.
Of course, the Mining Guild would be looking for new tech. If they were wrapped up in this, or worse, if certain people were wrapped up in this mess, then this suddenly became a much bigger problem than expected.
Olmed thought he would be sick.
“Are you coming back to Disguised Serenity?” Erzo asked Olmed through the hologram.
“In a few days. We’re going to my homeworld so she can see where I’m from.”
Erzo nodded. “Can I speak to her?”
“She is changing at the moment,” Olmed said.
Erzo made a face. “I’ll wait.”
“What is this about? Why are you so curious about her?” Something wasn’t right. Olmed had been around Erzo long enough to know that there was more to this than just a mere checkup.
“I just wanted to be sure—”
“You do not trust me,” Olmed said, crossing his arms.
“I trust you,” Erzo replied. “My mate is questioning everything right now, is all. Four days ago, she was on a different world. She has been nervous, especially when you two did not return from shopping.”
When they’d first left with Barnak and the others, he hadn’t considered all the variables. The spontaneous decision to determine the source of this issue and finish the task had been all he thought of.
“Apologize to her for me,” Olmed said. Phares would have been equally irritated with him had he not given any kind of notice.
Well, if Phares had been there to know about what happened.
More and more, Olmed worried about what he would discover in this process. Who did he believe? Dhomhes? Barnak? The Mining Guild?
Everyone had their own version of the truth. And no one’s seemed to mesh. Barnak acted with his own sense of right and wrong and didn’t really care that he was hurting others along the way.
The idea that he was selling equipment to the Mining Guild, though…
That was hard to believe.
The Guild had a reputation—while miners were a rough crowd and the work was not for the weak, they were honorable most of the time. They would take in convicts, obviously, as long as the convicts did their part.
The asteroids that had been unstable recently, Phares had mentioned before, and they’d been fairly successful in fixing the issue before they left.
At least, that was the assumption, until the one exploded, and Phares returned to the ship and the mining field to see what could be done.
If Olmed believed Barnak, then it made the possibility that Dhomhes and the Guild were working together make more sense.
It was all a jumble in his head, a mess that he was attempting to sort out.
“I will,” Erzo cleared his voice. “As long as she is safe,” Erzo said.
About that time, Tori came out of the refresher, clean and dry from her cleansing cycle, and dressed in a white tunic and black pants.
“Tori, if you would please come over here?” Olmed said, gesturing to the hologram.
“What’s up?”
“You remember Erzo.”
“Of course. Hey. Tell Polly I said hello.”
“A pleasure to see you,” Erzo said, his tail rocking behind him.
“Is that Tori?” Polly said, pushing into view. “Oh, goodness, you’re okay.”
“Sure, I am,” Tori said. “Sorry no warning. We didn’t have a lot of time, very spur-of-the-moment choice.”
“As long as you’re okay,” Polly said. “It’s so weird here, it always feels like someone is watching. Have you noticed that?”
Tori was about to shake her head, but Erzo was behind Polly and he nodded.
“A bit,” she replied, taking the cue from Erzo.
Polly visibly relaxed. “I thought I was going mad. Shadows in the walls and stuff. Maybe it’s because this is a new place. That’s what Erzo thinks, anyway. But I’m glad you’re okay.”
“We’re fine. Just going to meet his mom.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet.” She turned to Erzo. “Maybe that’s what we should do. Meet your family.”
“Uh, we can discuss that,” Erzo said as he reached for the hologram and turned it off.
As the image flickered out, Tori spun to face Olmed. “Why did I just tell my friend that I am paranoid too? I'm not. I don’t think I am, anyway.”
“Adjusting Space Sickness,” Olmed said. “Very common for those not used to living in false gravity to get paranoid or more nervous or otherwise have issues acclimating to the different way of life.”
“Oh shit! Is she sick? Will she die?”
Olmed chuckled. “It’s not that kind of illness. She merely will have to adapt. Once the body adjusts, the mind familiarizes itself as well, and she will be fine. Most humanoids who succumb adapt in about thirty standard days.”
“You don’t have an inoculation for that? They gave us plenty of those when we got here,” Tori said.
“Not everything can be inoculated for.”
“I guess.” She stepped away from him and turned. “How is this? You said I needed a simple outfit to wear when we landed.”
“That will be perfect,” he said. “If you’re going to walk among the Kantenan, you need to look like the Kantenan.”
"So Kantenans don't dress fancy, huh?"
"On the contrary," Olmed said and retrieved a blue and black woman's overdress from one of the storage drawers.
"What the heck?" She put her hand on it. "It looks like body armor." She raised the torso piece. "Ugh. I was going to say it was sexy body armor, but nothing this heavy is sexy."
She started to wrap the armor around her shirt. “Is this even close to how it goes?”
"Let me help you," he said as he grabbed part to help her into the suit.
They would be landing soon. She needed to be dressed so they could navigate the cities without anyone noticing her. There wasn’t any other way he could protect her while on Kantenan.
“So explain this to me,” she said as he fastened the latches.
“What?”
“If your people are miners, is the Mining Guild part of your people or something?”
“No, it is not.”
“Why do you work for them and not your people?”
He sighed. He knew he would have to speak to her about this before they arrived. He just wasn’t sure what to say.
“I was banished from my world, told I can never touch Kantenan soil again.”
“Harsh! What happened?”
“Many things.” He sat on the bunk and looked at her, half-dressed in Kantenan female body armor. The truth of his misdeeds could no longer be concealed. It would be best if he told her himself rather than let others tell his stories.
She put her hands on her hips. “Listen, I’ve had enough of lies, so you’d better tell me, or I’m going to—”
“I will,” he said. He raised his eyebrow to her. “Do not threaten me, unless you mean it.”
She blinked. “Don’t lie to me. That includes not telling me something important to ‘protect my feelings’ or some such.” She made a gesture with her hands as she spoke.
He didn’t know how the gesture related, but he understood her words clearly enough.
“I will not lie.”
“You’d better not. Now spill.”
“Kantenans have a strict doctrine. Much of it stems from the importance of mining citricite and how to process it properly. The amber stones are our life, and over centuries, a belief system has grown around it.
“Every once in a while, someone like me comes along. I questioned everything from the time I was a child. I wanted to learn and understand as much as I could. But to learn, I had to fight the system. Every rule, I argued. Every belief, I tested. As I got older, I fought everything.”
“Why?” she asked.
A simple enough question, but it gave him pause. “What do you mean?”
“Why did you fight everything? Surely you had a reason, other than being obstinate.”
He looked at the floor, then back at her. “It didn’t feel right,” he finally said. “It still doesn’t.”
“So why do you care if you ever go back?”
“You think I do?”
“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t want me to dress a certain way to hide my non-Kantenan form.”
“I want you protected so they cannot hurt you.”
“That’s not all you want. What else is there?”
“To be able to see my mother,” he finally said. “To restore some pride to my mother and allow her some status in her elder age. She should not have to die carrying my shame.”
Tori smiled. “Okay, we can work with that.”
12
There weren’t a lot of windows on the ship—a freighter, Olmed had told her—so Tori didn’t get to see much of Kantenan as they landed.
However, from what she could see, it was a green and blue ball. It looked like an Earth-like planet.
She was both terrified and excited.
She was about to step onto an alien world. All of this was an alien world. With her alien mate.
Olmed.
Dude looked like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Or maybe the weight of the solar system, anyway.
She reached over and took his hands.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she whispered.
He nodded and squeezed her hands back. He had explained what he knew inside that magic-blocking-bubble thing that kept anyone from hearing them. Barnak had hinted that the Mining Guild might be mixed up in all of this mess. There were still some missing pieces, but it was starting to align. If Barnak was stealing from the Kantenans and selling to the Mining Guild, then the Mining Guild could undercut the Kantenan prices on citricite, and generally cut them out of their profit.
But what the Guild needed was someone from Kantenan to bring in the goods.
That was what it looked like Barnak was doing.
Even with all that information, Tori wasn’t sure it would do anything for Olmed. She believed him when he said he did this so he could see his mother.
She just hoped his mother was happy to see him as well.
The freighter started to lurch, and Tori clung to Olmed. He wrapped his arms around her and held her steady.
“Re-entry can be rough,” he whispered.
“I guess,” she said. He’d taken her to a small port window she could see out of, but it was a little high, so all she could see was the lights from entering the atmosphere. The ship shook and rattled, freaking her out like any sort of plane travel. Not to mention they were descending, which felt weird enough.
Most of the time that she’d been in space, she hadn’t seen much of the outside world, and there wasn’t any turbulence to speak of up to this point.
But atmosphere seemed to be making up for that and triggering her plane anxiety.
“I hate plane travel,” she muttered as the ship came in for a landing.
“Planes?”
“Ships that don’t leave the atmosphere. They’re really common on my world. Lots of people buy tickets for them and travel around the world.”
“We will take a transport. It is similar. Will you be comfortable?”
“I’ll be fine,” Tori replied. At least now, she could prepare. This had caught her off-guard. She quietly counted the minutes until they leveled out.
Olmed held her to him as the vessel landed, though it was much softer than any plane landing she’d ever experienced.
Finally, she released Olmed, and let herself relax.
A rush of air slapped her in the face, cold and strange smelling, she wrinkled her nose and glanced at Olmed.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Pressurizing to equalize the ship to the planet’s atmosphere. Just wait, and the air will turn.”
“Turn?” she asked.
No, the air didn’t actually turn, but she soon discovered exactly what he meant—after a hissing sound, it was as if the air was sucked out and refilled with fresh air.
The difference between reprocessed air on the ship and the real air on the planet overwhelmed her.
In all the good ways.
Olmed gestured for her to come with him toward the exit, and they approached a big door that opened like a ramp for them to descend onto this world.
She was still awestruck by the idea that she wasn’t on Earth.
“Put your hood up,” he said as he raised his own hood. The cloak he wore obscured most of him to any casual observer, as did her clothing.
The armored chest pieces felt both secure and flexible. She’d worn corsets before, and this wasn’t much different. Bigger, with more heft. It also had attached hip pieces and upper body adornments that Olmed had made sure she wore as well. She bundled her hair into two top knots to keep the hood in place, looking like she had horns underneath her hood.
All around, she looked like a Kantenan female.
From a distance.
As long as no one did a body scan.
Tori trembled as they walked down the ramp and away from the ship. The landing pad wasn’t in the middle of a field like she’d expected, it was on the edge of a jungle. The greenery of jungle life, including the sounds of wind in trees, mixed in with the low hum of the freighter’s engines as it settled into i’s position creating a bizarre kind of backwash noise. Boxy- vehicles hovered nearby, where some kind of robots unloaded all the stuff from the freighter and packed it into the floating box trucks.
An impressive sight.
“They’re the mechs that do heavy lifting,” Olmed said.
“I figured they were some kind of automated system.”
“We have a couple of stops to make while we’re here.”
“Makes sense,” she said. Across the landing pad, there were what she assumed were the Kantenan version of cars. No wheels, which was only a little freaky, since they floated instead.
While the hovering robot trucks didn’t bother her, these did. Maybe because Olmed put her in one. It bobbed in the air as he climbed in and they took off, accelerating not like a plane, but faster than a car, anyway
She watched the view go by—tall, beautiful buildings that had incredible architecture, and below as far as she could see, the buildings went down as well.
Like cities stacked on top of each other.
“We weren’t on the ground?”
“No, there are layers below. We landed on the topmost one.”
She looked over to try and see something to give her some dimension. Instead, all she could see was vegetation and fog. “Can you even see the ground?” she asked.
“It is there. Some live there in different factions.”
What she could see of his face remained stoic. “Is it hard to be back?”
“No,” he replied.
She glanced at the vehicle, and something dawned on her. “Where did you get this car, if you’re not supposed to be here?”
“Dhomhes sent it for me, so I can travel to him without much notice.” Though the way he zoomed through the lanes—though did they call them lanes, if they were just spaces marked with floating buoys?—felt like he was desperate to get this over with.
If it meant zipping between other traveling vehicles.
Some had horns, and let them know they didn’t appreciate his fast speeds.
While it was super different, at least some things didn’t change.
They headed fast toward the shadowy place in the horizon. It kept getting bigger and bigger.
“Are we about to cross the horizon line?” she asked as they got closer and closer to what she had only seen in movies, planets with sides in darkness like that. Was it because of the rotation, or did the planet stay with this side dark?
Or the event horizon.
It could have gone either way.
“The dark side is where the refineries are,” he said.
“Why? Do the people not like the smell of them?”
“The citricite needs to be mined and processed with certain requirements, including a lack of light. So the refineries are located on the part of the planet that never sees natural light.”
As they crossed the line, darkness dropped over the area like a black wave.
The temperature also cool. This was a relief, since the layers she wore were thick and heavy.
While they might be bulky in some respects, they were warm, and she didn’t fear getting frostbite or something.
The refineries formed a city, sky scrapers that stuck out of the otherwise barren, dark land. A scent of ash and chill filled the air, like it was filled with frozen sadness.
