Arch/Eternal - Chapter Sixteen

Stash Collection

Skip this part if you’re caught up!

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d prefer to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you want to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Finally, here’s a short summary of what’s happened up to this point:

Earth is a protected (read: ignorant) planet nested within a galactic community known as the Fellowship. Historian/researcher Rita Freeman is a secret ambassador of this organization, who spends a lot of her time on other worlds. In an effort to help Earth become a full citizen planet of the Fellowship, and to rescue its people from total self-destruction, she is recruiting talented young people to build a better society.

One of these is Jackson River, who grew up with his grandmother in a tiny desert town in northern Arizona, and at 11 years old, lost his best friend after an episode of severe bullying. Another is Esther Quinn, who grew up in an idyllic home in Connecticut. When she was 11, her brother Adam was recruited by Rita to become the founder of a new movement called Cubensia. Years later, Esther moved to Boston to join him.

By some stroke of fate or fortune, Esther, Jackson, and another boy named Deek are late to a Cubensian launch party that becomes ground zero of an attack that destroys an entire city block. Rita scoops up all three of them into her spaceship, and heads for an interstellar gate buried in the dark side of the Moon.

On the way, she fills them in on the galactic drama that has been playing out between the Fellowship and the Confederacy, and the Firstborn, a powerful race of beings at the head of each of them — respectively called archs and eternals. Esther grieves the loss of her brother, Adam, and is vocally suspicious of an arch named Morning who was bonded to him, and should have protected him from what Rita claims was an attack by an eternal in Boston.

On the other side of the gate, they arrive at a planet many thousands of lightyears away, called Priezh. After a very brief introduction to a nine-foot human-looking alien named Poe, Rita tells them she will be back in two weeks, and leaves them there to receive the Fellowship’s version of basic training, starting with a series of torturous physical augmentations.

Meanwhile, a mysterious friend of Rita’s named Callan has been left back on Earth to try to figure out what happened…

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Stash Collection

Callan stands on the roof of the building and watches Rita’s ship fall upward into the sky. The fact she and the kids aren’t already dead suggests that whoever blew up Boston isn’t locked onto them. But who knows. At this point it’s mostly questions and guesses. Neither of which qualify as useful intel. 

He rides the elevator back down, considering his options. The trick is to not call attention to himself. He’s no match for whatever attacked the Cubist party — especially not without some armor or weapons, apart from micro graft that covers his body next to the skin. And even that’s not much good without a power source. 

Up until a week ago, Jackson was his mission. Test the kid, make sure he’s Fellowship material. He’s obviously sharp enough, thoughtful, curious, etc. All good qualities. But Rita called in Callan to test the boy’s grounding. Could he be dropped into various debaucherous circumstances and keep his head on straight? Could he hold his own in the face of an angry drunk with itching fists? Could he resist the temptations of power, and revenge? 

So they’d had some laughs. But Callan was more than ready to leave off for a different assignment when Rita called him in a panic. “There’s been an attack.” 

He draws a few curious looks as he leaves through the dorm common room. The students can tell he doesn’t belong there by some unconscious instinct. That’s fine. Theirs isn’t the attention he’s worried about. 

Outside, this side of the river, the absolute chaos in Boston is a distant buzz. 

He keeps well away from the self-driving car he left waiting on the street. The real problem is that there might be an actual eternal running around on this planet. The fact it knew where to hit means it either has sources of intel Callan isn’t aware of, or it was somehow tracking Adam’s astral lock. The latter seems more likely, but the former can’t be ruled out either. If anyone is watching his car, or the apartment he’s been using, or any of the places he’s frequented over the past month….

Confrontation with an eternal is an automatic loss condition, so it’s absolutely better to overclock precaution. 

So he walks. 

At first opportunity, he also chucks the phone and watch he picked up when he got here. These people and their leaky networks. If the Feds are here, they’ll have cracked open the whole thing like a beer cooler to take whatever they want. 

He keeps a brisk pace all the way to a little cafe off Brattle in Cambridge. There’s no chance anyone here recognizes him. He orders a coffee and stale croissant, and asks about the bathroom while they heat up the pastry for him in the microwave they keep out of sight of customers. The barista points around the corner and tells him the door code — wouldn’t want a dirty homeless person sleeping in there, would we. 

Callan uses the code to get into the bathroom, then locks the door behind him. The place is well-appointed, and reasonably clean. He crouches next to the tank behind the toilet and taps a pattern on the wall. A square piece of material, camouflaged to look like the surrounding tile, goes limp and falls away, revealing a hidden cavity. Before being deactivated, the cover had been rigid enough that if anyone tried to break through, the wall would have cracked first. He removes a small black package, and pockets the deactivated cover. Someone will doubtlessly notice the empty hole, but better that than the exotic material that had kept it hidden. 

He strips down, starting with his shoes, and neatly folds each item of clothing on top of them. The package he withdrew from the wall is made of a soft, matte black material with a fine waffle texture. It flexes easily in his hands, and splits down the middle to reveal its contents: some cash, a clean phone, a couple of flat power packs, and a glob of armor, about the size of a softball, made of the same stuff as the bag itself. 

Naked now, Callan takes out the ball and replaces it with his stack of freshly folded clothing, shoes first, and the pack widens easily to accomodate the extra volume.

In a smooth and practiced maneuver, Callan stretches the glob of armor onto his body, one foot at a time, all the way to the thighs. As he pushes his arms through the material, it starts to follow the contours of the rest of his body, until he’s covered up to his neck. Gripping the edges there, he pulls it over his head.

Looking now like a nude, matte-black sculpture of himself, Callan lifts the pack from the floor and places it at the small of his back, where it seamlessly adheres. At which point, he wordlessly activates the armor’s cloaking protocol, and becomes virtually invisible. 

He is now, finally, as safe as can be managed given the present circumstance.

Just as he’s about to make an exit, someone gives three quick knocks on the door, then almost immediately tries the handle. It turns easily, even though Callan is certain he locked it. He braces for a fight, toggling his armor to show thermals.

But it’s not a Fed. It’s just a big man who needs to take a shit.

Callan stands statue still and silent in the corner as his impromptu roommate noisily voids his bowels and heaves great grunting sighs of relief. He is grateful for his armor’s filtration systems. 

He could leave now, triggering shock as the appears to swing open by itself, but Callan decides to wait until the man leaves, so that he can follow behind. 

When he’s done, it is a delicate dance to avoid contact as the big man progresses from toilet to sink. But when he reaches for a paper towel, he backhands Callan’s upper arm.

He stops and frowns in Callan’s direction, who holds very still, willing the man not to get curious. 

But of course he does.

Wagging his fat arm back and forth, he manages to graze his fingers over Callan’s shoulder as he tries to silently move out of the way. 

Now he’s really curious. 

“..the hell?” he mutters, groping with both hands for what his hands have touched twice but his eyes can’t see. 

Callan silently curses the person whose job it was to make sure the restroom’s damn lock worked properly. 

As he continues to dodge the wheezing stranger, he orders his armor to prepare a very small dose of a very powerful sedative on the tip of his right forefinger. When it’s ready, he taps the man on the neck. As he spins around in surprise, Callan plants his feet, claps the man’s mouth shut with one hand, and snakes the other around his pudgy torso. 

The struggle would look very strange to an onlooker, a fat guy clawing at an invisible hand on his face, and wriggling against the firm grip of an invisible arm.

Even without the armor, Callan would be more than strong enough to restrain him. With the armor, it’s no effort at all. After a moment or two, the sedative kicks in, and the guy goes limp, his body drooping in Callan’s embrace like a ragdoll propped up inside a metal loop. 

The drug won’t kill him, but it’ll ruin his day. After setting him down very gently on the floor, Callan pulls five hundred dollars out of his pack to tuck into the guy’s pocket for his troubles. Then he opens the restroom door and props it open with a garbage can. Before he’s even out of the restaurant, he hears a panicked voice shout, “Someone call 911!”

Poor bastard.

He decides his first move will be go visit Twio Vaird, over in Brighton. It’s far, but Callan’s in the mood for a jog.

And anyway, he need the time to think. 

The attack on Boston had Firstborn energy signatures all over it, which could only mean one of two things: 1) It was the work of an entity (or group of entities) that wanted to make it look like a Firstborn action, or 2) it actually was a Firstborn. 

Callan is praying it’s the first option. In that case, the most likely culprit is Feds trying to stir up trouble. Why? Who knows. How did they get here, to a planet buried deep inside Fellowship space? Again, a mystery. Could it actually be an unaffiliated team native to Earth? Less likely. No one had that kind of technical capability. Not even the handful of Fellowship ambassadors, expats, and tourists scattered around this little globe could pull off an attack like that, nor would they. 

So it was Confederates, or it was an eternal. Theoretically, it could also have been an arch, but that would make even less sense than some rogue Fellowship people doing it. If it was really was a Firstborn, it was almost certainly an eternal. 

And as much as he wishes it wasn’t, Callan is pretty sure it was.

His working theory is that the attack was bait. And the scale of it, the shock and awe, seems aimed at the archs themselves. Who would want to pick a fight with the archs? Nobody but an eternal. Or several. And in that case it makes sense that they’d let a couple of Fellowship friendlies get away. You need a hook to carry bait. Thanks to some unbidden memories of a fishing trip in upstate Colorado — a whole other life — Callan can’t help but imagine an eternal bright-body on top of MacGregor Hall, flicking a long pole, casting a line out into space. At the end, whipping the line through the Moon gate, Rita’s ship and passengers, ripe with grief and desperation, ready to be swallowed up by angry archs then reeled back in. 

This theory’s biggest problem is that any direct conflict between an eternal and an arch would be a blatant treaty violation, calling down the mighty wrath of Firstborn neutrals. The threat of that had, to Callan’s knowledge, kept archs and eternals from picking fights for something like ten thousand years. 

Not that conflict between the two empires didn’t happen at all — otherwise people like Callan wouldn’t have much to do. But it was all proxy wars — Confederate troops invading Fellowship space. Not usually the other way around, but sometimes, depending on the circumstance. Regardless, eternals and archs themselves stayed out of it. They were the nukes. They fight, everybody loses. 

But no matter what way he looks at it, what happened in Boston smells like bait. Callan’s been doing this stuff for a long time, and he knows what bait smells like. It smells like the indiscriminant slaughter of noncombatants, and destruction with no obvious tactical purpose. It’s terrorism. It’s picking fights. It’s starting wars.

And if he’s right, and that’s what it is, it means one of two things: either there’s a rogue eternal who’s trying to light the galaxy on fire, or the Confederacy itself has decided it’s big enough to ignore the treaty. Both of these possibilities are very, very bad. So bad that the smart thing is to try not think about them. 

He just wishes his gut would let him.

More information. 

Gut or no gut, he needs more information. Twio probably won’t know anything, but he might know someone who might know something. 

You gotta start somewhere.

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