Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 15

Chapter 15: Space to Think

I awoke with a start to a hand on my shoulder. The lights in the lobby had faded to their nighttime tones, indicating the passage of time if nothing else. I looked up to find one of the mortal nurses looking down at me.

“The lockdown is over,” he said. “You can go home, now.”

I blinked the sleep from my eyes and rubbed at the sore neck sleeping against the side of a sofa had left me. “I should stay until Vihaan wakes u—” I froze. I pressed my palms against the floor to look up and over the armrest at the couch behind me. It was empty. “Where’s Vihaan?”

“He’s fine,” the nurse led, clearly hearing the worry in my voice. “His parents took him home.”

“Oh,” I said, slumping back down onto my ass. “Without waking me?”

“They were more concerned with Vihaan, and you needed the sleep.”

I raised an eyebrow at the man who had just woken me up. “And I don’t anymore?”

“That was seven hours ago. The cleaning team is here and need you out of the way.”

“Oh. Oh! Sorry. I’ll just…” I scrambled to my feet, taking note of the absolute mess of bloodstains I’d left on the floor. None of it was mine.

I wandered out of Family Housing B in a daze, stretching in every way I could think of in a vain attempt to alleviate the absolute havoc my sleeping position had wrought on my lower back. It wasn’t until I made it to the transport station that I bothered to check the time on my holopad.

Three AM.

I sighed. It seemed the cleaning crew had waited until the absolute last possible moment to wake me. So much for my sleep schedule.

I decided, as an empty pod slid into the station, that I was happy they hadn’t roused me when Vihaan left. I didn’t think I’d have had it in me to relive the attack for a couple of concerned parents. I did my level best not to relive it as my pod shot towards housing D.

I waved to Wilma—Arthur’s nightshift counterpart—as I crossed the empty lobby and mounted the stairs to the third floor. I made it three steps past the landing before I saw him.

Nick stood alone by the window, staring out into the starry sky. Even at the late hour, given the day’s events, I didn’t blame the guy. Instead, I moved to join him. “Couldn’t sleep?”

He didn’t look away from the window. “It’s like the universe hates us,” he said. “It’s not enough that the void would trap us on these rocks. It has to send monsters to hunt us even here.”

I shuddered at the idea before rejecting it. “The void didn’t send those things. I think they were escaping it.”

“So the universe hates them too,” Nick reasoned. “People say that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think they’ve got it backwards. The vacuum abhors nature.”

“The void doesn’t care,” I said in no uncertain terms. “That’s really all there is to it. It was here long before us and it’ll be here long after we’re gone. It makes no effort to support us, yet bears no grudge that we specks of dust have the audacity to exist. What more could you ask of it?”

Nick didn’t answer.

“I think it’s beautiful,” I continued. “We fight and we learn and we build and we fix all to keep out the cold. I’ve spent my entire adult life working as a vac-welder, working to hold the void at bay. I didn’t stop hate or violence or greed or death. Those don’t come from the void. They come from us. They come from life. All I could do was hold the line against encroaching apathy—a patchwork, dented, rusty bulwark against uncaring. That’s the only real danger in the dark.”

“But in the end, the void always wins.”

“In a way,” I replied. “We all spring from nothing and we’ll all return to nothing in time, but that’s not defeat. Emptiness isn’t our enemy; it’s the universe’s default state to which we are the exception. I really think the only way we can lose is to stop caring. All life flails against infinity. To stop is to stop living.”

“Flailing against infinity,” Nick mused. “I like that.”

“It’s kind of becoming my catchphrase.”

“Really?” Nick raised an eyebrow. “It’s not a very good catchphrase.”

I laughed. “No, I suppose isn’t. It’s way too brooding.” I reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to go wash up. Get some sleep, okay?”

“Yeah, I will.” Nick didn’t turn from the window. “Thanks.”

“Hey, don’t thank me. Before the year is out you’ll have a weirdly broody catchphrase of your own.”

That earned me a smile. “I look forward to it. Goodnight, Cal.”

“Goodnight,” I echoed his sentiment as I turned and left, stopping at my room to exchange my bloody clothes for a towel before heading to the showers. By the time I emerged still feeling not quite clean, Nick was gone.

I lingered for a few moments as I made it back to my room, considering my sloppily made bed and the early hour. Sleep seemed impossibly distant. I needed time to think.

A flash of motion caught my eye from outside, drawing me to my bedroom window. Even at four in the morning, Fyrion bustled with activity as workers in vac suits scurried across the hull repairing the damage the void horde had inflicted. I didn’t watch for long.

I donned a clean uniform and left my dorm behind, crossing the lobby and calling a transport pod without second thought. Minutes later I emerged into a hurricane of laborers.

Baggy-eyed mortals hurried this way and that, carrying all manner of tools and parts for gods know what as they each went about their specific tasks. Those wakeful enough to notice the cultivator in their midst stopped to salute or offer confused and anxious looks. Others simply made way, hoping I wouldn’t stop them from going about their work. None dared stand in my way as I moved through the busy staging area.

The nervous and unwelcoming glances I received clashed against my life experience. All too often I’d been the mortal keeping his head down as a cultivator passed by. Even now I often felt like that. The way these people looked at me… I shuddered.

Most cultivators didn’t think me one of them. Apparently, neither did the mortals.

I tried to wait in line for a chance to speak with the foreman, but the queue seemed to evaporate around me as I approached. With a sigh I stepped up to the messy desk, looking past the five empty and two half-full coffee cups to meet the man’s gaze directly.

“Whatever you want, get one of your valets to handle it,” the foreman barked at me. “Half the station’s leaking atmosphere; I don’t have time for sect business.”

“I’m here to help.”

“This is a worksite, sir,” he spat the honorific with more derision than I’d previously thought possible. “Not your chance to look for enlightenment. Go meditate on your own time. We have work to—”

I cut him off. “I’m a guild certified vac-welder.”

He blinked at me. “Low-G?”

“Zero, but I can manage.”

“Good enough,” he grumbled. “You should’ve led with that.” He twisted his neck to look back over his shoulder. “Gary! Get our cultivator friend a vac suit. I’m sending him out to breach eleven.” He looked up at me. “Don’t fuck up.”

I smiled at him. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I didn’t waste any more of his time, following a red-haired fellow—presumably Gary—over to a row of wall hooks sparsely populated by hanging vac suits. He wordlessly pointed at one and walked away.

True to my expectations, my loose-fitting cultivator pants bunched up uncomfortably around the crotch once I put the vac suit on, but the slightly-too-big suit helped alleviate the discomfort. Within minutes I had a hud in front of me, a torch in my hand, and a collection of sheet metal strapped to my back. I shared the airlock with four others, but as the doors opened and Fyrion’s grey surface exposed itself, we all went our separate ways.

My first weld took longer than I would’ve liked as I grew accustomed to working in point-zero-eight G, but soon enough I fell into a familiar pattern, bounding from job to job as my hud directed me.

My mind wandered as I worked, a sort of meditative calm overtaking me. For a few precious moments the world almost felt normal again, at least until I finished a weld and realized Brady wasn’t there to criticize it. At the very least, it felt good to work with my hands again. Even with the dwarf planet below me, it was the closest I’d been to a vacuum since roofie.

Most of all I spent the time mulling over the day’s events, picking apart my every decision in the search for some lesson to be learned, something I could’ve done differently to spare myself—to spare Vihaan—the traumatizing experience. Time and time again I came to the same conclusion.

I had to get stronger.

Between today’s attack and what’d happened on roofie, I couldn’t escape the frightening truth that the galaxy was not a safe place. I had the tools at my disposal, the opportunity to develop into a power the likes of which the system—if not the galaxy—had never seen. I could contribute as a vac-welder. I could effect change as a cultivator.

I had to get stronger.

By Lucy’s telling—which I trusted far more than anything sect leadership published—the attack had been far too coordinated for what it was. Whether it’d been by chance or on purpose that they’d come while her orbit had her on the wrong side of the planet was up for debate, but mindless beasts didn’t randomly hit the comms and local net, not as precisely as today’s horde had.

I couldn’t begin to fathom what that meant. Had they come for Lucy? Had they come for me? That seemed unlikely. The void beasts I’d encountered hadn’t even looked at me.

Only about a tenth of the horde had made it through Lucy and Fyrion’s other orbital defenses. That a living being would so willingly throw its life at something like that astounded me, even knowing their propensity for violence and hunger. It absolutely reeked of some greater plot, one so far beyond me that it left me reeling.

I had to get stronger.

My holopad’s alarm beeped seven o’clock. My hud flashed that I was due a break for rest and hydration. My body sluggishly agreed.

I stepped back into the airlock in silence. I ignored the curious glances of the mortal laborers as I went through the motions of peeling off my vac suit. I let them stare. I wasn’t one of them any more.

Images of haughty cultivators flashed through my head, of Elder Smith’s derisive gaze, of Elder Berkowitz practically falling over herself to flatter Lucy. I’d never be one of them either.

I was something knew. I was something different. I’d carve my own path through the endless night, and anyone who didn’t like it was welcome to fuck right off.

I came away from my morning’s labor with remarkably few answers, yet I felt all the better for it. Of it all, the only true conclusion I’d reached had come early, not in my contemplation but in my conversation with Nick.

The void didn’t care. The living did. If I learned nothing else from my communion with the infinite sea, I prayed I could learn to do both, to wield cold apathy like a double-edged sword, cutting loose the petty frivolities of the living to better defend the hot passions of life.

Then and only then, as I wandered through the uncharted dark, could I find my Way.

——

“Elder Lopez?” her secretary’s voice crackled over the intercom. “There’s a Senior Cadet Alice Garett here to see you?”

Maria Lopez rubbed at the dark circles under her eyes. Apparently a void horde had shown up while she’d been in isolated meditation, cruelly robbing her both of her chance to gloriously lead the defense, and her night’s sleep. Elder Lawrence—the self-important prick—had taken all the credit and left her to deal with the mess.

She’d be stuck signing off on requisition requests and casualty compensations for the next week, and that was ignoring the elder council meeting later that day to discuss what the attack might’ve meant for Fyrion as a whole. The few details she’d seen already seemed off, which meant she’d likely spend the entire evening listening to Elder Rajadendra rant about sabotage from the Dragon’s Left Eye.

The thought was foolish, of course. Nobody could control the void hordes, not that Elder Rajadendra would ever accept that.

She groaned as the intercom beeped expectantly at her. “What does she want?”

“She says a walking corpse delivered an injured child to Family Housing B.”

Maria straightened in her seat, pausing for a moment to keep her voice disinterested and disbelieving. She couldn’t have this cadet thinking she was worried. “A walking corpse?” She forced a sigh. “Let’s get this over with, then. Let her in.”

She picked up a random report from her desk as the cadet walked in, pretending to read it while the stocky woman saluted.

“At ease,” Maria said without looking up. “You saw a walking corpse?”

“I did, ma’am,” Alice replied. “It—he—brought a wounded boy out of void beast-controlled territory into Family Housing B for medical care. Healer Li said he probably saved the child’s life.”

Maria clenched her fist beneath her desk to keep from otherwise reacting. She answered with a dry tone. “How heroic of him.” For the first time since her entrance, Maria looked up from her report to meet the cadet’s gaze.

Alice Garett stood some five and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and a healthy layer of muscle that loaned a sense of stability to her physicality that her voice belied.

Maria raised an eyebrow at her. “You are aware that Fyrion hosts a cadet who masks his qi, correct?”

Alice hid it well, but Maria caught the slight twitch of frustration her eyebrow made as she answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re aware this cadet shares classes with a number of young children? Classes which might’ve been in session at the time of the incursion?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice replied through gritted teeth.

“Do you suppose, in the midst of an incursion, you might’ve conflated your physical senses with your spiritual ones?”

“I know what I saw,” Alice snapped before adding a too-late, “ma’am. His skin was pale and cold. He wasn’t breathing. His heart didn’t beat. He didn’t come to life until he was already running me down.”

“He ran you down?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice regained some of her composure. “I was guarding the eastern first floor hallway into Family Housing B at the time.”

Maria saw her opportunity and pounced. “It sounds to me like the two options here are that you got mixed up in the heat of the moment, or you allowed a product of necromancy past your guard unchallenged. Is that right?”

“Ma’am, I—”

Maria cut her off. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to find everyone you told about this and let them know you were mistaken. You will refrain, in the future, from spreading dangerous rumors. If, in the process of my own investigation, I find merit to your wild claims, I will be forced to call a tribunal to evaluate your decision to let a walking corpse into a room full of mortal and children. Am I understood?”

Alice seemed to relax at her mention of an investigation, at least until the word ‘tribunal’ set her eyes wide. “Understood, ma’am.”

“Good. You may go. Hope you don’t hear from me.”

To her credit, Senior Cadet Alice Garett held herself well as she spun on her heel and exited the office. Maria watched with cold eyes as the door closed behind her.

She tapped her holopad. “Show me Caliban Rex’s class schedule.” The relevant data popped up. Maria scanned it for the number she needed before issuing a second command. “Bring up the security footage outside classroom… B-eighteen. Yesterday at fifteen hundred.”

A larger window sprang up from the holo projector in her desk, displaying a two-dimensional image an empty hallway. Maria leaned in. She watched with rapt eyes as a crowd of children spilled into the hall, followed by a man pushing a stainless steel cart and wearing a woolen blanket like a cloak. Maria thought he looked absolutely ridiculous.

The surveillance system automatically tracked his progress, flipping from camera to camera as he led the gaggle of babbling brats towards their next class.

She watched as the black shape burst through the window, scowled as its foot impaled a dark-skinned child, counted the seconds before Cadet Rex reacted.

He took three. Maria filed that bit of information away for later.

She watched the strange ram his cart into the void beast before stomping its head in—hardly an elegant solution, but an effective one. She took in every detail of the way he leaned in to pick the boy up, how he directed the class towards the nearest bunker, the way he nobly made sure they all made it in before following them to safety.

She’d have to contain this footage. The last thing Maria needed was the sect to herald the soulless abomination a hero.

No camera monitored the bunker itself—the presence of a toilet in there would’ve made surveillance a privacy violation by sect policy—but she looked on as the cadet emerged a different man.

A chill ran down her spine.

The surveillance cameras unfortunately lacked the detail for her to determine whether his heart beat or his lungs drew breath, but his skin had certainly lost all color, retreating back as if shriveling upon a corpse. With bony hands he pushed his cart, moving with a trancelike calm she’d never seen in the man before.

Convincing Alice Garett she hadn’t seen a walking corpse may prove harder than Maria had hoped. She prayed her threat would at least keep the girl quiet.

Thoroughly unnerved by the image before her, Maria chewed her lip as Caliban paused to glare with cold uncaring eyes at a half-devoured corpse before casually moving on. Her own stomach churned at the sight, at least until she sent a wave of qi through the relevant meridian to quiet it.

She realized she’d struck gold the moment the image flicked to a hallway in which three void beasts feasted on a dead mortal. Her mind raced with possibility as she imagined what kinds of unique or secretive techniques the outworlder might utilize to overcome what seemed to her to be overwhelming odds.

She wasn’t prepared for him to do nothing.

Maria didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink as Caliban Rex swerved to the far side of the hallway and walked right by the blackbloods. He didn’t so much at shiver at the horror a few feet to his left as he passed, seemingly unperturbed by the deadly beasts within arm’s length.

More harrowing still, the beasts just let him past. They didn’t twitch. They didn’t try to defend their kill. They certainly didn’t attack. Cadet Rex may as well have been invisible to the creatures for all they reacted to his passing.

Invisible, Maria realized, or familiar.

Could the void beasts have raised this corpse? That seemed impossible, but so too did their behavior towards Caliban. Maria found it more likely that Cadet Rex was hardly his benefactor’s first experiment. She’d just have to add experimenting with void beasts to this mysterious necromancer’s long list of crimes.

She scrolled forward through the rest of the video in the hope it’d reveal more as to the nature of Caliban’s relationship with the blackbloods, but found instead his encounter with Alice Garett much as the senior cadet had described it. The moment he got to safety, life returned to Caliban. Nobody else even glanced at him with suspicion.

Maria’s first step was to store a copy of the footage on her holopad and scrub it from the local net. She still didn’t know enough to definitively declare the cadet a danger, and dared not risk anyone else stumbling upon her discovery. When she finally exposed him, it’d be her and her alone that got the credit for it. In the meantime, he had more to offer her.

She made a note to have her secretary schedule a meeting with the suspicious recruit and turned back to the footage she’d saved. Only as she pulled up the image of Caliban so calmly pushing his cart past three killing machines did Maria’s eyes peel away from the screen to notice her hands were shaking. She forcibly stilled them.

She stared at the image for some time, clasping her hands tightly in her lap as she comforted herself with the reminder that the cadet hadn’t hurt anyone yet. It’d only be a matter of time before he revealed his monstrous nature. She’d just have to be ready to stop him when that inevitability occurred.

If she spun it just right, wrung every resource she could out of him before being the one to save the day when he eventually went rogue, then maybe, just maybe, Elder Maria Lopez of the Dragon’s Right Eye may’ve found her ticket off this gods forsaken rock.

Maria shoved the report she’d faked reading to the bottom of her pile. She’d yet to really start it before the incursion had dumped a veritable mountain of work on top of her, all of which took priority. Besides, with this new footage she’d found, Maria had far more promising leads on Caliban Rex to pursue.

RF-31 had probably just fallen to the void horde anyway.

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