Emerald
Legion, chapter seventeen
“A tale of
three Ranzzes” – another family reunion, with 250%
less property damage
********************************************************************
Garth
settled down onto the mattress with a contented sigh, already sinking into
sleep, arm draped possessively over Imra’s slender
form, his sun-freckled arm contrasting sharply with her flawless ivory skin.
Champion
Ranzz, came the Queen’s crisp voice through the
Champion’s Ring. You have a guest,
please report to the audience chamber.
“Sprock.”
Garth said as Imra’s mental voice tinkled with
laughter in his mind. “No rest for the
wicked,” he said with a grin, turning to steal another kiss.
~Go,~ Imra thought, pushing him
gently but firmly away, with a matching grin, ~Don’t keep the Queen waiting.~
Garth
stepped into the bathroom and freshened up, before slipping into his Champion’s
Garb and heading out, blowing Imra another kiss
before cycling the door shut.
He could
hear voices talking in the audience chamber, and came in to found Sarya crouching next to her robot dinosaur, talking to a
pair of legs belonging to someone who had crawled under it and was fiddling
with the controls.
“It
was built for war?” the Queen was asking dubiously.
“Not
military so much, as designed for gladiatorial matches with other giant
robots. It’s an annual thing they have
out in the desert areas of this continent.
“Ayla?!?”
Garth shouted, rushing over and dragging the figure out from under the
machine, only to see a hand upthrust, crackling with
rose-tinted electrical energies.
The Queen
stepped back quickly as Ayla rose to her feet, hand
still crackling with energy. Garth just
looked puzzled, pushing her arm aside and folding her in a massive hug that
lifted her from the ground.
“It’s so
great to see you! When did you get
here? How long are you staying?” Garth begin to say
all in a rush while spinning around.
“Garth!” Ayla shouted in a
strained voice, “Garth! Put. Me. Down!”
Garth set
her down, but kept his hands on her shoulders, repeating, “It’s so great to see
you.” Reaching up and brushing her
cheek, so much slenderer than his own, but still
having the same strong lines. “You look
good,” he said softly.
Ayla’s
hand had stopped glowing and she looked angry and confused, “I’ve commed and commed, and you never sprocking answer,” she pulled away and smacked Garth on the
shoulder, “And now you’re all, ‘I’m so glad to see you!’ like nothing
happened! Like you never left us! Like you never left *me!*”
Garth was
suddenly aware that Rokk, Jath
and Imra had flown into the room.
“Uh, no
emergency, just family stuff,” Garth said, hands in the air, stepping
in-between Ayla and his friends.
“I
called them when I saw the lightning.”
The Queen said dryly. “The
last Ranzz family reunion set fire to the Talokkian
Embassy…”
“Yeah, we
should probably take this somewhere else.”
“An
excellent idea,” agreed the Queen, “Perhaps your
quarters,” she suggested, “assuming that you
still remember where they are after all this time.”
Garth
flinched slightly, and turned to a distracted Ayla,
who was staring at the new arrivals.
“Hey, how about we go somewhere a little more private before you kill me
for being a rotten brother?”
“Huh?” Ayla said
blinking. “Yeah,
sure.” Pointing to Rokk, she asked, “Has anyone ever told you that you look
just like Kid Cosmos?”
Rokk
smiled, and raised his arms in triumph, mimicking the most famous image of him,
after his second victory as planetary champion.
“Yeah. I
get that a lot. Want an autograph?”
“You *are*
him!” Ayla
said. “Wow. I had your holo on
the wall.” Her face darkened, and “Well, until the
scandal, and then Dad said that you weren’t an ‘appropriate role-model’ and
made me change it.”
Garth took
her arm. “We have to leave now, before
you tell my best friend that you had a crush on him.”
Ayla
took her arm back, “Who said ‘had?’ He’s
still hot.”
Rokk
grinned and stepped to the side, “Nice to meet you, Ayla. And this is my wife, Jath.”
Ayla
snapped her fingers, “Darn. The good
ones are always taken.”
Rokk
looked to Jath, who was fingering a short sword-sized
blade idly, “She doesn’t mean anything by it, honey.”
Jath
shot him an impatient look. “She admires
you. What of it? She pays me a compliment by praising my
choice. If we on Kathoon,
I would make you wear less clothing and have you accompany me everywhere.” Rokk’s eyes shot
wide as she finished. “I would get many
compliments.”
Garth said
from behind his hand, “Can we please leave now, before the trauma becomes
irreversible?”
“Yes,
please,” added the Queen, who had settled herself back on her throne
and was reading a pad. “That wasn’t a request.”
*************************************************************************
Rokk, Jath and Imra huddled in Jath’s quarters, Imra pacing near
the doorway.
“Seriously,
just peek in there with your mental powers, make sure
that nobody’s getting electrocuted.” Rokk said.
~No. I’m not going to spy on Garth. This is personal, and if he wants us to be a
part of it, he’ll share it with us.~
Jath
tossed silver hair-pins into a board across the room idly, saying in a flat
tone, “Such respect for your mates privacy surprises
me.”
Imra
shot Jath a look, only to receive a challenging stare
in return, before Jath turned back to her impromptu
game of darts.
Rokk
just looked back and forth between the two women, “Okay, what did I just miss?”
**************************************************************************
“So,” Ayla said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “This is your room.” Smacking her hand on the bed and bringing up
a small puff of dust, she grinned, “And that’s what the Queen meant about you
not remembering where it was…”
Garth just
shook his head. “Yeah, I’m staying with Imra, the one who isn’t married to Kid Cosmos.”
“Not with
the Queen? I was wondering…” Ayla commented.
“Sprock, no!
She’d kill me.” Garth said,
before walking up behind Ayla, who was running her
hand along the shelf, picking up more dust.
“Let’s stop saying useless stuff.
I screwed up, Ayla. I got scared, and I ran away and left you
deal with all sorts of crap that I should have been there to help you deal
with.”
“Yeah, we
agree on that, at least.” Ayla muttered angrily.
“I didn’t even know where you sprocking were
until I saw the newsfeeds of you and Mekt blowing up the Talokkian
Embassy.”
“We did
not ‘blow up’ the Talokkian Embassy. It was only a few small fires and they put
them out pretty fast,” Garth began. “And
I’m changing the topic, again,” he muttered.
“Yeah,
well, that’s what you do best, isn’t it, Garth?
Run away.” Ayla
demanded, “Is that what you’re going to do to your new girlfriend? Bail on her the second it gets tough? The second she isn’t
exactly who you want her to be?”
“Look, I
know I screwed up, and I don’t want to mess up again. Can’t you just give me a sprocking
chance here?”
“Give you
a chance? Right! My life is going sideways, we’ve got
lightning shooting out of our hands, Mekt is sprocking nuts, ranting about how the weather control
service is unnatural and must be destroyed, and you’re *gone!* The farm’s totaled, our folks are freaking…” Ayla ranted, not hearing Garth’s intake of breath.
“What do
you mean the farm’s totaled?” Garth
demanded.
“What? You don’t even know? It’s gone.
We had to move to Chaba province…”
“Why is it
gone? Are mom and dad okay?”
“Yes, they
ran out of the house when the lightning started flying. Mekt was on one of
his tears, and he blew up the silo. We
lost the second harvest, and I tried to distract him while mom and dad got
clear, but we both ended up destroying the house, and shutting down the
power-grid over the county.”
Ayla
had leant against the wall, arms folded and Garth wanted to go to her, but knew
that she was still too angry to accept any comfort from him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. He was just too strong. He kept trying to convince me that we were
the avatars of the storm or some crap and that it is was our sacred destiny to
free Winath from the weather control service. He said the storms would bless only the
righteous with rain, and strike down the unworthy, as nature intended. He knocked me out and bailed. Mom saw him drive off. Dad had gone for help, and mom ended up
running into the house to pull me out before it collapsed.”
“Chaba province?
What’s there?” Garth asked.
“A farm that isn’t burnt to the ground.
The government resettled them, called it ‘disaster relief,’ and gave
them some land that had been left behind by a family that had resettled
off-world.” Ayla
looked up, eyes veiled. “But Chaba province is in the boonies. It’s all naturists and their damn
religion. Turns out they think that
changing your gender is unnatural and defying the natural order. So we couldn’t get any hands to help us with
the harvest, because they didn’t want to be seen around me.”
“I’m
sorry, Ayla.”
“No big
deal. Same sort of attitude I had to
deal with from you,” she said bitterly.
“It’s not
the same at all!” Garth shouted, getting
right in her face. “You didn’t trust
me. The biggest thing *ever* is going on
with you, and I had to find out with everyone else, when you got caught
sneaking Pro-fem! Yeah, I messed up, but
you didn’t even give me a chance to get it right!”
“Maybe I
knew you’d freak!” Ayla
shouted back. “*I* was freaking out
about it, the last thing I wanted to do was try to talk *you* ‘through it! It’s not enough that we shared everything, I could tell that you weren’t like me anymore,
and that you’d never feel what I was feeling.
We couldn’t share this, Garth!”
Garth
again resisted the urge to hold her, putting his hand on the wall next to her
and leaning close. “So why come here?”
The anger
drained away and Ayla lowered her head. “Because I didn’t know
where else to go.” After a deep
breath she continued, “You left. Then Mekt freaked out and destroyed everything, and we didn’t
hear anything from him until we saw the news-reports. By then we were trying to start all over in Chaba, but the naturists were making it hard, and I
realized that I had to go. Mom and dad
would never be able to hire enough hands to run the farm with me there, so I
just followed the family tradition and ran away.”
Garth
finally reached out and placed his hand on the side of her face, turning it to
face his. “No. I ran away.
You ran to me. That’s way smarter
than what I did,” he smiled, pointing at the disused bed. “I happen to know a place where they’ve got
an extra room…”
“I don’t
think your Queen would approve.” Ayla said
doubtfully.
“Please. She’s spent a star-cruiser worth of money
outfitting Rokk with mag-steel
and Imra with psi-metal. I totally rate an extra room,” with a grin he
added, “And, if you program her pet dinosaur to attack people that piss her
off? You’ll be her best friend.”
Ayla
looked up, resting her hand on her brothers
chest. “You know we aren’t square
right? I’ve never felt so, so lost. I always felt bad for Mekt,
all alone, but I never in my worst nightmares thought I would know what that
felt like.”
“I screwed
up real bad.” Garth admitted. “And you’re gonna
have to give me the rest of our lives to make up for it, okay?”
“Deal.” Ayla nodded,
hugging her brother.
***************************************************************************
“So you
also throw lightning, like your brothers?”
Jath asked matter-of-factly, around a mouthful
of kabba fruit.
“Yeah.” Said Ayla,
feeling vaguely uncomfortable sitting with Garth’s friends.
“A useful talent.” Jath grunted, spitting out seeds and reaching for another
fruit.
“So,” Ayla said towards Imra, hoping to
stave off another uncomfortable silence, “You and Garth, huh?”
~Yes,~ Imra thought with a smile. ~We complement each other well.~
“So, a Titanian telepath, a Braalian
sports-star and a, uh, Kathooni was it?” Jath just
nodded. “Warrior
woman. I guess that makes Garth
the odd-man out, since you guys all naturally have powers…”
Rokk
cut in smoothly, “Jath also received her abilities
later in life, but there are hundreds of Warriors like herself back on Kathoon.” He looked
sideways at his friend, biting his tongue.
Looking
around at the Champions, Ayla noticed the matching
wary looks of curiosity on Rokk and Imra’s faces, and how Garth was avoiding meeting them. “He hasn’t even talked about it, has he?” she
said, and Garth shook his head as the others perked up. Even Jath looked
up, curiosity overcoming the slow torture she was inflicting on a kabba fruit with a smaller knife. “Let me guess, ‘oh, some things are better
left a mystery.’”
Garth just
threw his hands up, “Fine. But I get to
tell it.”
The others
leaned closer.
“I had
just finished flight training, and I wanted to show off, so I rented three
orbital ‘burners for me and Ayla and Mekt, figuring I’d lead them out on the training loop
around the second moon and back.” Garth
began. “Everything was going good, and Ayla had managed to hot-rig the comm
and control systems so that that I could slave all of the controls to mine, in
case one of them was having some problem with something. We circled around to the dark side of the
moon,”
Ayla cut in, “Mekt
complaing the whole time how sprocking
boring it was.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we were just at the apogee, and
turning back to the planet when some sort of energy discharge came up from the
moon’s surface. We were too close, which
was completely my fault, I wanted to skim close to make it more interesting,”
“We
insisted, Garth. You were being a wuss. And it’s not
like it would have mattered, the energy surge went well into the safe zone,
anyway.”
“Anyway. It shorted out our systems and Mekt and Ayla both crashed into
the surface. The slave controls totally fritzed out it was all I could do not to crash my own
ship.”
“I made
sure my suit was sealed, and went out to check on Mekt
and Ayla. All
three ships had landed soft, and nobody was hurt,”
“Not that
you could tell, from all the complaining Mekt was
doing,”
“Can I
finish?” Garth said, shooting Ayla a glare. She
just glared back, and he continued, “And then we determined that the fuel cells
were completely drained. We couldn’t
even break lunar orbit, let alone land safely back on Winath. And, of course, the emergency transmitters
were burned out. It was like everything
that could possibly have gone wrong, had.”
“That’s
when we saw that the energy column was still active on the horizon, and moving
towards us.” Ayla
cut in. At Garth’s look she
shrugged. “You were taking too long.”
“Right,
the energy column swept over us like a wave, and the only thing I remember is
lightning lashing over me and something pounding in my skull. I saw these creatures, and they seemed to be
moving around us. Ayla
and Mekt were also on the ground, thrashing around
under the creatures lightning attack, and I saw them catch fire and die. I felt myself die. My suit was breached, my skin was black and
cracking and I think the last thing I felt was my eyes
explode.”
“Ow.” Rokk exclaimed sympathically.
~Was it
some sort of hallucination? Oxygen
deprivation from the suit malfunction?~
“No
idea.” Garth shrugged. “I have these fuzzy memories of getting up,
suit all repaired, no damage on me and jerking around like I didn’t know how to
walk. Lightning shot out of my hands and
recharged the fuel cells. Mekt and Ayla were there, too,
and we fixed up the ships and launched into space. The next thing I remember is waking up on Winath in the med-center.
They told us we’d landed on auto-pilot, and that there was no sign of
injury or damage to the ships. That we’d
been unconscious ever since the mysterious energy discharge on the moon’s
surface.”
“The only
thing they couldn’t explain was that our ships were almost fully fueled when we
landed. It’s like we’d gotten to the
moon without expending any of the fuel cell’s charge.” Ayla added.
“The
authorities were baffled, because our stories didn’t match up. I told them about the creatures I saw, orange
skinned quadrupeds with tentacles on their faces that the lightning came from. Ayla described them
as humanoid stick figures, made out of lightning bolts, and said they lashed at
us with whips of energy. Mekt said they were clouds of energized particles, shot
through with static discharges, and that they enveloped us.”
“He also
said they talked to him…” Ayla said derisively.
“Yeah. I felt a weird pressure in my skull, and even
during the worst of it, I never felt like they were trying to hurt me. Ayla said it felt
like some sort of mathematical progression, like they were trying to
communicate. Mekt
had this whole story about the fury of the storm, and us being chosen to return
Winath to the forces of nature or something.”
“The
authorities ruled that we had just hallucinated, and Garth seemed to accept
that. He nearly lost his piloting
certification, because of the altered flight-plan, but they let it slide
because of the energy surge. There was
no record of anything like that, anywhere, and they couldn’t explain it. They just sort of buried it, and while Mekt and I insisted that it was something else, everyone
else was happy to forget it.”
“I just
didn’t see how it mattered. We
discovered our lightning powers that day, and spent the next few weeks being
poked and prodded like lab animals.”
Garth shrugged, “Mekt’s ‘theories’ to the
contrary, we didn’t have any special insight to offer, and I didn’t want to
spent my life trying to figure out why it happened, or *what* had actually
happened. I just wanted to go home and
get my life back…”
Ayla
nodded, “I get that. But Mekt needed something to feel special, and I wanted it to
mean something too, because I couldn’t deal with the crap I was going
through. I just wanted to focus on
something else. Garth thought I was
crazy…”
“No, I
thought you were right. But as much as
you wanted to poke at it, I wanted to ignore it and make it go away.” Garth admitted.
~Didn’t
you have a theory of your own?~ Imra asked
curiously.
Garth
looked up, as if he’d forgotten that the others were still in the room, so
wrapped up in this moment with Ayla. “Uh, no, not really. Mekt had a theory,
and it was insane.”
“Like Mekt,” Ayla added.
“Yeah, and
Ayla had a theory that made more sense than anything
I would have come up with, so I didn’t even think about it. I was trying to find a piloting job, and
nobody wanted to hire me after the accident because of the whole ‘lightning’
thing, so I was annoyed that these powers had messed up my life. I didn’t want to sit around thinking about
it, or have Ayla and Mekt
reminding me of the accident all the time…”
“What was
your theory, Ayla?”
Rokk asked.
“Please tell me that you guys are transcending into energy beings,
because then we can collect the whole set…”
“Uh, no.” Ayla said, looking
at Rokk like he had grown a second head, “My ‘theory’
is that the energy surge was a probe, from another dimension entirely. One of energy. It crippled our ships, and the beings we saw
were energy creatures. They wouldn’t
have material forms, especially not any forms that we could understand, and so
our minds just made up images to fit over them.
They hurt us trying to communicate, and then they fixed us and sent us
home.” Ayla
turns to Garth, “Did it sound this lame when I was telling it to you?”
“Pretty much, yeah. But I liked the
ending better than Mekts,” he grinned.
Jath
had long since finished tormenting fruit and was sitting back with her legs on
the table. “Will the changes pass on to
your children?”
Both Garth
and Ayla looked surprised, but Garth was the first to
respond. “I don’t think so?” he shrugged, “The
researchers couldn’t find *anything* different about us. No genetic changes, no extra electrolytes, no
increased neural energy, nothing. But
when I want lightning, I get lightning.
They couldn’t figure out where it comes from, or how I make it appear,
or how I make it stop. They did
brain-scans and bio-electric stuff, but my body didn’t change at all. I can be standing pointing at a wall, or I
can be shooting thousands of volts of current at the wall, and my heart-rate
doesn’t change or anything.”
“I’d guess
no, since our DNA hasn’t changed.” Ayla concurred. “But
who knows?”
“So
anyway, I’ve been saying it’s kind of a mystery, and it is. We don’t really know what happened, or even
*if* there were other beings present, or much of anything. I kind of prefer it that way. It wouldn’t really change anything if we did
know one way or the other, would it?”
“I don’t
know, it would kind of change my feelings about the
whole thing if it was invaders from an alien energy realm and they tried to kill
us or something…” Ayla
said with a grin.
************************************************************************
The Queen
had agreed that Ayla could stay in Garths room ‘for
the duration.’ She left it unclear
exactly what ‘the duration’ meant, but proclaimed that she too knew what it was
like to be many light-years from home, and the comfort of having family near.
************************************************************************
In a
shadowed chamber, a humanoid hand rests gently on an enormous curved bicep, the
sound of slow breathing coming from the mountainous form before him.
“It is
time, my son, time to meet your mother.”
His hand
reached back to press a button on the console behind him, and a signal travels
out from the secluded base, reaching through the endless twilight of
space. On ice-bound Titan, a woman
clutches her head and begins to silently scream.