Under a New and Brilliant Sky, page 1
Under a New and Brilliant Sky
R. E. Stearns
Published by Near Earth Press, 2024.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
UNDER A NEW AND BRILLIANT SKY
First edition. October 1, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 R. E. Stearns.
Written by R. E. Stearns.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For Mom
This one has talking animals (kind of)
CHAPTER ONE
Days and many kilometers outside the prison walls, Elys pulled her stolen coat’s hood as far over its attached dust mask as it’d go. The windstorm spun whirlwinds of orange dust between the dust-coated buildings around her.
Still holding her hood, she ducked against the wind while she walked along the deserted street. Everybody with pickups would’ve gotten a weather warning to stay indoors until the storm passed. In the infrared spectrum, which the Republic Information Service had stationary cameras to hunt her through when the wind grounded their bots, Elys would be the warmest thing outside.
Dust-orange buildings on either side of an alleyway dulled the wind. The storm had been calming for most of the day, but Elys’s clothes carried enough dust to weigh her down. She crammed herself into a doorway, held her breath, and activated the coat’s fans. The coat blasted the dust inside it into a cloud around her. In seconds, the wind whisked it away.
Now that the storm was fading, the coat might’ve been doing her more harm than good. Coats like this weren’t cheap, and Elys would rather be cold than found by whoever was looking for it. She took it off and threw it in a trash bin.
Two steps past the bin, thin wires lashed around her face, arms, and stomach. All her muscles clenched painfully tight. She was falling.
Elys lay on her side in an alley, waiting for her limbs to stop twitching. The strangers who’d trapped her here wore utilitarian clothes beneath coats that hung open now that the wind had died down. The night hid the colors they wore, and Elys saw no insignias or badges. Local government agents loved their uniforms too much to work without them. These strangers might be Transgalactic Federative Republic officers, or bounty hunters.
“Come here and help me wrap her up,” the much larger stranger told her wiry partner. The clarity of her speech meant she wasn’t wearing a mask, which meant she didn’t intend to use any airborne chemical persuasion on Elys. They both pulled on thick gloves.
The woman’s gloved hand encircled Elys’s arm as she disentangled Elys from thin wires strung between the buildings on either side of the alley. Elys’s limbs began tingling as soon as they came free of the net. After dangling from the wires for what felt like an hour before these people dropped her onto the street, moving her fingers was an accomplishment.
Once the strangers bound her arms behind her, wiggling her fingers was about all she could do. Their restraints were a lot bigger than the cuffs Elys had talked her way out of... How long ago had that been? A week, maybe.
The smaller stranger lifted Elys’s immobilized legs one at a time, rolling up each thin pant leg. Her larger captor jammed two fingers against Elys’s neck for several seconds. Both strangers moved like they did this all day, every day.
Elys opened her mouth to ask who they were. The question sounded more like “Hoo ah oo,” and she barely heard it beneath the traffic humming along the highway overhead.
“She did something to her wrists.” The big stranger held Elys’s arms out for the wiry stranger’s inspection.
“Looks like the net didn’t burn her much.” The wiry one rolled Elys’s pant legs down and covered them with thick restraint wraps that reached from her shins to her thighs, immobilizing her knees. “Left ankle’s black and purple, right one’s bruised up too. That happened before we got her.”
Her chest ached from a knife wound only a few months old. If these people cared this much about Elys’s health, they weren’t RIS officers. At least if these probably-bounty-hunters killed her in the street, the Republic Information Service wouldn’t get another chance to assassinate her.
“Vatirah, it’s a fair catch.” Impatience whined through the wiry stranger’s argument. “Let’s put her...” The sentence faded under highway noise.
Behind the one called Vatirah, something crunched against the concrete. Elys craned her neck in the largest voluntary motion she’d made since she’d gotten trapped. Her black hair fell over her eyes, and she tossed her head to flick the ends away.
The highway lights above silhouetted someone slimmer and taller than Vatirah. A small light on the new person’s chest clicked on, further obscuring them while illuminating Vatirah’s round and gold-toned face, and her frowning, white partner.
“What are you doing?” The new stranger’s accent seemed to part their lips as little as possible while still enunciating the words. The vowels rounded unexpectedly.
Vatirah and her partner let go of Elys to stand and face the speaker. “She’s an escapee from Amberson,” Vatirah said. “We’re taking her back there. It’s our job. I’ll walk a couple steps toward you so you can read my profile, okay?”
As Vatirah stepped past Elys, Elys’s gaze caught on the pickup clipped to the back of Vatirah’s neck. The device covered a cluster of green or blue photophore dots which, thanks to the Hochberg mutation in most people’s brains, connected Vatirah to the digital universe. The pickup hid her photophores’ flashes of light as they translated her intentions to the device’s transducers.
The new stranger came near enough to let their pickups introduce the two of them, exchanging names, jobs, and pronouns. If Elys had her own pickup, she could’ve done even more with it.
“I see it’s your job,” the new stranger said in a low and slightly rough voice. More loudly and presumably for Elys’s benefit, they added, “Are you okay?”
“I can assure you, she’s fine,” Vatirah said over Elys’s “Not really.”
Elys twisted her wrists slowly to avoid drawing attention to the motion. They ached. Most of one thumb had been numb for days. The base of the other didn’t feel anything either. Without them, her spasming fingers kept slipping on the leg restraint.
“That assurance is very responsible of you.” The new stranger stepped farther into the dusty alley. The circle of light on their chest shone brighter than the lights the two probably-bounty-hunters wore on their own jackets.
“This person’s dangerous.” Vatirah raised a hand, palm out, to stop the new stranger from coming any closer. “I don’t know what kind of crises you’re used to responding to, but we’ve got this under control. Please step back to the sidewalk.”
The wiry partner let Vatirah do the talking, which meant he was watching Elys. The outside end of the wrap around her legs, roughened by what Elys suspected was frequent use, brushed the tips of her twitching fingers.
Far away, a siren wailed. The new stranger sighed. “Let’s see if we can work something out.” The new person spoke in the same calm speech pattern Vatirah had been using. Had they gone to the same slow talking school? Elys worked two fingers under the leg wrap.
“Hey Vern, could you give Officer Hagen a call?” Vatirah’s question came at a faster clip than her previous statements.
“Yes, ma’am.” Her partner’s gaze unfocused as he reached out to someone digitally.
Since Vern was busy sharing his location with a law enforcement officer and Vatirah was watching the new stranger, nobody had their full attention on Elys. If some unlucky enforcer got caught in their own restraints, they could push up in just the right place and disconnect the end of the leg wrap. As long as nobody stopped her, Elys could twist herself around to reach that spot too.
The new stranger took another step into the alley with empty hands raised in front of them. “We need that person’s help with something important, and she can’t help us while she’s in Amberson.”
If that was true, this new stranger wasn’t an RIS officer either. The RIS could’ve taken Elys out of Amberson whenever they wanted.
“Can I offer you money in exchange for her?”
The sum the new stranger named wouldn’t have paid Elys’s rent, back when she’d had a home to pay rent on. The insult made her push too hard
“Listen, mx, I picked her up first.” Vatirah’s slow talking sounded louder and more threatening, now. “So I’m—”
One second the stranger was standing five or six meters in front of Vatirah. The next, the two stood centimeters apart. The stranger slapped a hand — no, something held in it — against Vatirah’s neck. The light on the new stranger’s jacket went out. Behind Elys, Vern stopped his muttered conversation with Officer Hagen and drew a gun.
Elys’s fingertips curled over the leg wrap’s loose end. When she pushed, the end snapped free. It’d take longer to unwind than it’d take Vern to shoot the new stranger. Elys rolled into Vern’s legs, curling around them with her full weight. He tripped over her and fell hard.
The stranger caught Vern’s arm and laid him on his back beside Elys. His gun wasn’t in his hand or on the ground nearby. Vatirah sank to her knees, her mouth slack and her eyelids drooping while she fumbled at the gun in her leg holster.
Elys pulled at her leg restraints. Beside her head, Vern breathed in burbling inhales and slow exhalations. When Vatirah collapsed beside him, Elys chose to believe that the other hunter kept breathing too.
The fall knocked Vatirah’s pickup off on one side, exposing green photophores dulled with unconsciousness. Elys focused on unwinding her restraints instead of reaching for the pickup on the ground. Even if Vatirah had left the device unlocked, a professional like her must’ve enabled its tracking functions to find it if it slipped off her thick neck.
The new stranger crouched over the bounty hunters with a cylindrical injector held above them, letting it estimate their weights. They clicked their tongue and pressed the injector to an exposed patch of Vern’s arm, muttering something about “too much.”
The injector disappeared into the stranger’s jacket pocket as they knelt by Elys’s hip to unlock the wrist restraints and help her tug the leg wrap off. They wore thin gloves and a jacket that hung stiff with light armor, especially around their shirt’s high collar.
In the dim lights from the highway and the bounty hunters’ jacket lights pointed at the overpass, Elys saw no badges or government insignias on the new stranger’s clothes. A braid or vine pattern rose from the cloth.
A rival bounty hunter might carry whatever weapon had knocked out Vern and Vatirah, if they were ruthless enough to steal from the competition. So might an RIS officer. The person’s jacket bulged where they’d tucked Vern’s gun into an inner pocket.
“Elisabet Kundakçı?”
“Sure.” Despite her quick breath and racing heart, Elys’s voice came out clearer this time.
Her rescuer’s warm laughter spread a lovely smile over their dusky brown face. “What part of that’s wrong?”
“The family name’s longer than what you said. Like, ‘come back here.’ Kundakçı.” The stranger had mangled Elys’s first name, too, but Elys’s short name would sound better in their earnest voice.
“Alright, Kundak-cheh?”
“Close enough.”
“I’m Taia.” They nodded while touching one hand to their chest. Elys braced for Taia to grab her arms and put on new restraints, but Taia stood still, focused on a digital resource Elys would need a pickup to see. “Vern called in some police,” Taia said, “so we have to get off-planet fast. Do you want medical care, a shower, and... Dinner, I guess?”
“Please.” Elys might regret following a stranger home, but if Taia delivered all that, finding out who they worked for could wait.
CHAPTER TWO
While the ship Taia had traveled here on shuddered out of Martian atmosphere, Elys slept for minutes at a time between attempts to talk herself into leaving her comfortable chair near the airlock. As far as she could tell, nobody had hidden any dream pods in this room to chemically affect Elys’s experience here. About a dozen people in the same light armor as Taia passed through the room individually or in small groups, giving Elys space each time. Nobody dropped anything that small and cube-shaped, so if they were using dreams, they were hiding them well.
Taia’s hand on her shoulder made her jump. “...didn’t get food?” Taia said. “Do you want that first, or a shower?”
“Cleaning up sounds good.” The food did too, but Elys had eaten more recently than she’d found something clean to wipe the dust off with.
“Okay! I’ll show you our room. The other comms specialist needs to get their stuff out of it still, but then it’ll be you and me in there for the next week. Two beds, one bathroom. Is that alright?”
“Sure.” It was irrational to be even slightly disappointed that there were two beds. That didn’t stop Elys from feeling slightly disappointed.
“Oh, city save us, I forgot to...” Taia took a deep breath. “This is an Alyansan vessel under the command of an Alyansan crisis response unit. That’s us. Everything that happens on this vessel is publicly archived, including activities in bedrooms, bathrooms, storerooms, and cupboards. The city is delaying publication to keep you safe, but you’ll appear in the secure archive no matter what is published. What questions do you have about that?”
Alyansan. From Alyansa, the sole station on Mayari, a planet that’d stayed independent from the Republic mostly because their star was as far from the Sol system as it was possible to get and still find populated planets. And Taia was not smiling like she’d just told an obscure joke.
The planet Alyansa appeared in searches for relaxing vacation spots, communities that relied on robotics, and real people doing embarrassing things in sight of the station’s public surveillance system. Every kid had giggled through at least an hour of footage of Mayari people in bathrooms. The Mayari never seemed to care who saw them doing what.
“I have a lot of questions. But, sure. Free porn for someone, I guess.” And unlike in Amberson, Elys wouldn’t have to interact with the people who claimed to get off on memories of her body.
“Most Alyansans don’t watch like that, Elisabet.”
“Your dossier or whatever didn’t tell you I go by Elys? Rhymes with ‘jealous,’ if you need help remembering.” Although Taia’s accent differed enough from Elys’s Martian/Reznikovan combination that her standard reminder might confuse Taia more than it helped.
“Sorry, Elys.” The short name sounded lovely in Taia’s voice. “We’ll make sure it’s on the profile the city makes for you.”
The bedroom was even smaller than the typical cabin on a ship this size. Warm lighting and the carpeted floor made it cozy instead of cramped. Outlines in the walls showed where to fold out a table and attached chairs.
Someone had folded out one of two beds. The blue bedspread matched a physical painting on the wall that showed a beach on a sunny day. The painting must’ve hidden some of the room’s cameras.
In the hall, Taia said, “I’ll make some food. I’m almost as tired and hungry as you look.”
“Rude.” Still, the observation made Elys chuckle. Her black hair stuck out in tufts all around her head, like it always did when she couldn’t get it cut. People commented on that, or the way her clothes wrinkled within minutes of taking them out of a drawer, before they talked about her looking hungry.
The bathroom mirror revealed her tufty hair more clearly than the shatterproof mirrors in Amberson would’ve. Her reflection looked strange without the prison uniform. Dirt, bruises, and exhaustion stained all the olive-toned skin outside her stolen clothes.
Taking the clothes off exposed more bruises and Martian dust ground into her pores. The numb parts of her hands looked unsettlingly normal. The bruises from the cuffs could’ve been smudges of dirt.
Ten luxurious minutes later, she stepped out of the waterless shower. The stall buzzed as it sanitized itself. Somebody had left folded clothes on the counter.
This bathroom door might’ve had a lock on the inside, and Elys hadn’t even thought to use it. The clean set of sweatpants, long-sleeved shirt, and underwear, all in shades of navy blue and gray, fit her better than anything she’d worn in years.
When Elys emerged from the bathroom, the bedroom smelled like food. That might hide any scented dream pods, but a couple sat unopened beside stacks of small white cooker boxes on a shelf folded down from the wall beside the door. Chemical persuasion was literally still on the table.
