Tumbling After

Luke Bellmason's NaNo-novel, day three:

Among his other life-threatening injuries, LeVant had lost an arm and eye in the attack. The arm was quickly replaced. They had scanned his existing arm, mirrored the resulting 3D model and fabricated a bio-mechanincal replica within twelve hours. The operation to attach the new arm had taken barely more than two hours, but the eye would take longer.

A Corp doctor, dressed in the light blue robes of the Corporation Medical Division, explained to Taylan that a replacement would have to be grown from live cells extracted from LeVant’s good eye. This would take at least two days, and she shouldn’t expect him to regain consciousness before then anyway.

Taylan had stayed with LeVant in the ward aboard the Corporation’s Medical ship all night and all the next day. She felt sorry for the fact that there had been no one else who had visited him. Apart from a procession of corporate officials and medical staff, there had been no family of friends to come to see him.

In the weeks since they’d arrived in system, she had not had much contact with Kerrin LeVant. He’d been so wrapped up in Corporation business. All the stuff he’d been preparing for over the last eight years on their voyage from Earth had come real. Taylan realised that the time on the ship on the way over here had been like a holiday compared to the work they’d both been thrown into since they’d arrived.

She’d used the excuse of her own injuries to keep herself aboard the hospital ship, but they were not nearly as serious as the ones he’d suffered. He’d lost so much blood before the med team had been able to get to them and on the evac shuttle they’d struggled to stabilise him. It had been touch and go whether he’d make it. Now, he was over the worst, but he still had not woken up.

Eventually Taylan herself fell asleep, though she fought it. She knew what horrors awaited her in her nightmares and didn’t want to have to experience it all again. She had considered asking for the drug the top corp executives used which kept them awake with no ill effects, removing the need for sleep completely and allowing them to work continuously without fatigue, but the medic had advised against it in her condition.

She had been right to fear her nightmares. Each was a more intense rendering of the events of the previous day, but prolonged and unceasing. While the actual explosion and its aftermath had lasted less than half an hour before they’d been lifted out, in her dreams no help came. The explosion continued outward, through the crowd in front of her, splitting alien and human bodies open as she watched helplessly. It split her own body open and continued through the air into the sky and out into the orbit of the Earth fleet and the station. And when it was all over, she would wake up in the hospital chair and the explsion would start again, destroying LeVant as he lay in his medical bed, taking him apart slowly, atom by atom, in a never ending cycle of destruction.

When she finally did wake up, she burst into tears only to discover that LeVant had woken up and was sitting bolt upright in front of her. He leant into her and put his new arm gently around her shoulders. It felt warm and soft, but it was unmistakably mechanical. Even more so when LeVant stretched around to put the other arm around her. She sobbed for several minutes while he comforted her, before realising that he was probably in some considerable discomfort himself.

“I was supposed to be the one doing this,” she said. “I wanted to be here for you when you woke up,” she managed, through tears.

“You are,” said LeVant, unsteadily. “It’s a welcome sight, let me tell you.”

“Do you know what happened?” Taylan asked, suddenly recalling all the things she had rehearsed in the hours she’d waited.

“Last thing I remember was sitting down, next to you,” he said. “Then waking up here about fifteen minutes ago.”

“So you don’t know about the bomb?” He stared at her, open mouthed. Taylan worried that she’d said something wrong and that the shock was probably the last thing his body needed right now. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you right out like that…” LeVant shook his head,

“Bomb?”

Taylan was scared to speak, frozen in time just like she was in her dreams. She watched LeVant go through the different reactions to this new information.

“Is that why my arm hurts so much?” He said. Taylan couldn’t stand it any longer. She sprang from her seat and ran from the room, her legs barely able to carry her. She desperately looked around for somewhere to throw up and managed to make it to a sink in a room on the opposite side of the corridor. As the contents of her stomach drained slowly into the sink, she had the thought that she wasn’t supposed to be here.

The thoughts started to come; she wasn’t trained to be talking LeVant in his current condition, she wasn’t supposed to be in his room, she probably wasn’t supposed to be on a Corporation ship without being on official ELIJA business. Then her panic spread wider; she was six light-years from her home planet, she’d nearly died and if she had been killed her parents wouldn’t even have found out about it for another six years. For all she knew, her parents might even be dead!

She started hyperventilating and stood up from the sink, only to be hit by an intense dizzyness. Two medics were there in time to catch her as she went down into a faint.

She had no idea for how long she was out, but the ward’s artificial lighting system had been set to night mode. She looked up from her bed to see LeVant sitting there beside her.

“Hey, seemed only fair I should return the favour,” he said. She smiled back at him. It filled her with an enormous sense of relief to see him there. His strength, his familiarity. It was comforting.

“Did they tell you?” she said. “Everything?” 

He nodded and lifted up his artificial arm to show her.

“This was what was bothering you?” Taylan gave him an apologetic sort of look.

“It all seemed like too much to take in at the time.”

LeVant picked up a stack of smart paper and showed it to her. “I’ve been catching up on events, I’ve got to get back to work pretty soon or I’ll never make the time back.”

“You’re going back to work already?” Taylan said.

“I have to, can’t afford to lie around here. The timetable won’t stop just for me. I’ll be in the next room if you need me.” Then he kissed her on the forehead and turned to leave.

“Wait,” she said.

“Please, just a minute longer.” She grabbed a hold of his hand and then couldn’t figure out if it was the real one or not.

“Listen,” he knelt by the bed and leant in closer to her, “when we’re out of here and you’re feeling better I’ve got the most amazing surprise for you.” She looked into his one remaining eye. “I’m going to take you to meet someone, if you can keep a secret.”

“What? Who?” She said, but he just laughed softly. Now, it felt silly to be acting like giddy school children, but the excitement on LeVant’s face made him seem like a nine-year-old at Christmas who knew what presents she was getting.

“You’ll never believe it,” was all he said. Then he left.

-1,190

The Company

From Luke Bellmason:

I’ve fallen way behind with my NaNo this year, so I’ve had to abandon the idea of writing the novel in the month of November. However, I think the story is interesting enough to continue with so I’m going to write the 30 parts I would have written and had roughly planned out. It might take until the end of December or beyond, but who’s counting?

—

2 The Company

The investigation into the bombing began almost immediately. As usual, each of the three sides of the Earth Expedition wanted their own people on the investigation and the local aliens had both a police investigation and a branch from the government. Despite the huge number of people on the job, or maybe because of it, none of them found anything. This was as expected.

Warbur waited a discreet amount of time after Dita had left the scene, then followed him to the Capital city of Tho-Tewr-Turl. ‘Turl was a stark contrast to Tok-Cenb; an industrial hub with factories pumping out smog and manufacturing consumer goods in an early example of an emerging capitalist economy.

The Vonbekians had managed to accomplish all this before the Earthers had arrived and the smog in the atmosphere had allowed astronomers to identify Vonbek as a planet that was not only inhabited, but also in the latter stages of an industrial revolution.

Current estimates placed the most advanced sections of Vonbekian society somewhere around the middle of Earth’s 20th Century. Only later, before the first ships were ready, did the Earth astronmers detect the tell-tale traces of nuclear explosions in the Vonbekian atmosphere. It seemed that Earth history was being followed all too closely. This single fact had thereafter been used to justify every interference made by the Earth Expedition.

The factory on the outskirts of ‘Turl was older than most of the others which had been built around it later. It’s original function had already been outmoded by various engineering advances and several attempts had been made by the owners over the years to update its machinery to keep up with current technology. To Warbur, every building in the whole district was as useless as the other, age made no difference. On the Corporation ships they had fabrication systems which could fit on a desk and manufacture anything.

The owners of the block had been only too happy to rent it out to the newly formed company. ‘The Company’ was how Warbur and Dita referred to it too. It had a nice, anonymous ring to it. Their ‘front’ was the newly formed branch of xeno-linguistics. They ran a language teaching service and provided translations into English. They did not have many customers, but since they were being secretly bankrolled by the Earth Government, this didn’t really matter. The company had recruited many new teachers and linguists who were interested in this new field of study. Invariably these aliens were pro-Earth and among the most intelligent of their species; precisely the kind of people they wanted to recruit.

Warbur drove the car along the newly constructed highway from the airport and turned off into the side road and finally into the factory car park. There were a couple of lights on at the top of the building and only one other vehicle in the parking space next to his.

He found his way inside the factory through a low door and climbed the long shallow stairway up through seven or eight flights to the top floor. There, he saw the tiny offices from where the lights eminated and the single figure crouched over a desk.

Dita was reading from a computer screen and Warbur could see clearly from the images and vid-clips that he was studying the Earth-Encyclopedia entry on ‘Terrorism’.

“It’s all rather depressing, isn’t it?” Said Warbur as he entered. “Remember that everything you read about in there happened over centuries, seeing it all compressed down like that might give you the impression that humans aren’t the kind of people you would want visiting your planet.”

“Hmmm,” said Dita, “seems like there’s plenty of Vonbekians who think that already.”

“We aren’t proud of our past,” said Warbur, “but we always hoped you could learn from our mistakes. That was one of our reasons for coming here.”

Dita closed the display down and pulled out some sheets of paper that had been lying on the desk beneath it.

“Do we know any more about the attack?” He asked.

“Not really, it was a bomb, planted some time before the presentation took place. No word on whether it was a trigger or a timer. There’s not much we can piece together.”

“So what do we do now?” Said Dita, looking up at Warbur.

“We figure out who planted it, and why.”

Dita handed the papers to Warbur. There was a list of names, photos and details, all written in English.
“These are all the people we know about who belong to the Separatist movement. You’ll remember I told you about them before, but until now they’ve been content to merely talk about getting rid of the Visitors from Earth and holding demonstrations.”

“So something must have changed,” Warbur mused.

“What were the motives for terrorist acts?” Asked Dita, “in Earth history, what did they hope to achieve?”

Warbur sat and studied the names while he thought about Dita’s question.

“Terrorists were usually people out of power, marginalised, who felt they were being ignored or persecuted. Minorities usually. Many governments saw them as criminals and refused to even talk to them.”

“We refuse to negotiate with terrorists!” Dita quoted from the encyclopedia entry.

“Despite that, these groups often achieved what they wanted; exposure in the media, and recognition from whoever they were targetting.”

“But their methods?” Said Dita, “civilian targets, indiscriminate bombings.”

“It made them almost impossible to stop, and the methods worked. That’s why they used them. They often achieved what they wanted, though sometimes only after years and at great cost. Would the people on this list fit that profile?”

Dita went to a larger, older computer at the back of the office and turned it on.

“We have a couple of agents in the Seperatist movement, we had them recruited last year at your suggestion.” Warbur nodded.

“What level?”

“Intel mainly, we get updated about what’s happening, but not near the top level. Pretty weak stuff really, but from what we’d been hearing we hadn’t considered this group to be much of a threat. Are you sure they’re responsible for the bombing?” Dita asked, then started opening some of the files which had popped up on the screen.

“I admit, it’s very odd.” The old computer was not a Corporation model. It was at least thirty years old, pre-dating even the formation of the seven companies that eventually created the Corporation.

Non-corp technology was now almost impossible to find, but it was vital they used something which Warbur knew had not been made by the ‘enemy’. That computer Dita used had more processing power than all of the computers on the rest of the planet combined. Almost everything in the office that Warbur had provided them with was a relic from Earth’s twentieth century and the spycraft that went with it was even older than Warbur was, but it had to be this way. Vonbek was at a stage of technology roughly equal to the post-atomic age and there were strict guidelines and agreements about what technologies Earthers could bring down, or even talk about. If ELIJA stumbled onto this office and found computers, a large scale scandal would ensue which could jeopardise the whole expedition and lose favour back home.

“Here we are, the Separatist leader. No Earth name I’m afraid, but we have given her the codename ‘Ysna’.” Alien names were unpronouncable, so the four letters of the postcode for the location they were born in could be used. It made for some interesting combinations. Warbur went to look at the file which Dita had brought up on the screen.

“We should bring her in. I’d like to ask her a few things.” Said Warbur.

“I think we could handle that, but where?”

“Some local office,” said Warbur. “The local police station if there is one, I can arrange the necessary orders, whatever you need.”

-1,329

Audio Fiction

I had the privilege to be a guest today on a Christian women's organization's podcast.

Yesterday I got a message on Facebook from the founder of Maryland Women of Worship. I wrote a couple of short articles for them in 2008, and we've been in touch ever since. Tomorrow's guest on their podcast The Ellie Show had to reschedule, she said, and would I like to fill the slot? Of course I said yes, I'd be honored. And it turned out that I got to be on the very first episode of The Ellie Show.

Ellie gave me a very nice introduction, both in the podcast and on MWOW's blog, and I read portions of my novel Resist the Devil.

Listen to the Episode.

While The Ellie Show is brand new, Ellie herself is not new to online broadcasting. She also hosts The Gospel Music News & Video Showcase.

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