“It hasn’t even been a week!”
“Feels a lot longer,” Aileena said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Michael turned ninety degrees, straddling his legs over the bench, trying to obscure his modesty. “So, these monks?”
“Yeah, so big religions have a lot of little sub-sects. Churches of this, brotherhoods of that. The Rhythm is the biggest religion around, and well, that means there are thousands and thousands of these little groups. The monks thought that the Rhythm determined everything, every life and every death. In their eyes that justified mercenary work. If it was all pre-ordained anyway, why not make some money off it?” Aileena pressed a button, and the machine began to fill with a hiss.
“Brekt mentioned mercenary work is popular for your people.”
“It is. We’re a bit of a backwater, and well our kind is good at it. It’s the eyes. We have keener eyesight, faster reactions and much better peripheral vision than most species. Makes us pretty handy in a fight. And well, it’s either that or farming. The monks are a natural extension of that.”
“Training kids to fight?”
“Training kids to survive. As they saw it, those kids were going to be mercenaries anyway. It’s all preordained, right.”
“You said saw,” Michael said. “What happened?”
“The Council vigorously disagreed with their interpretation.”
“Why did they even let them get started in the first place?”
Aileena stepped over the bench, taking a seat next to Michael, her back turned to him. “The Council controls a lot of space. Keep things quiet and it can take forever for the Council to find something out. Years, decades, sometimes even centuries. Of course, once it’s out there, stuff spreads like wildfire. Bad news tends to travel out here, like an infection, growing exponentially. Someone sends a message drone into a system, and they send out a bunch more message drones to other systems and so on.”
“So, what happened when the Council found out?” Michael leant backwards, resting his shoulders against Aileena’s.
“Same thing that always happens when you piss off someone with big spaceships covered in guns. They blow you up. Turned the monastery and most of the countryside around it to glass.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Aileena sat silently for a moment, rubbing her hands together in her lap, her head drooping down. “A handful of monks survived, out getting supplies at the time. Every job I get, I put a little money aside, a fund for them to rebuild.”
“That’s why you took this job? Brekt said it was a big payday.”
“Bigger now the bird has promised to increase it. Enough to pay for the rebuilding outright. Somewhere outside of Council space. Somewhere safe.”
Michael chuckled awkwardly. “Outside of Council space is safe? So far, we’ve been prisoners of pirates and attacked by weird giant crabs who were also some kind of disease for like, a space barnacle? It’s oh for two so far.”
Aileena allowed a smile to creep across her face. “Fair point. You know, you’re not so bad to talk with. Normally you can’t keep it shut, but you can listen well too.”
“Don’t you start. I don’t need more people thinking I’m some kind of messiah figure. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do. On Earth, it’s always so clear. Lead some people to their promised home, absolve humanity of sin, slay some mythic beast. Stuff like that.”
“Another problem with having so many different religious factions. A lot of them agree that there is a messiah. They just can’t seem to agree exactly what they’re supposed to do.”
“Feels like at the moment I could do anything, and I would get praise for it.”
“It’s that whole circle of reputation thing I talked about.”
“Well,” Michael said. “At least no-one is going to be spreading stories about me any time soon.”
The probe dropped into real space again, happily steaming across the void. Its fuel was nearly depleted, the dumbbell-shaped craft designed for only a single short trip. Its destination reached, it began pumping out its message to anyone who could hear it, the events of the arena spreading outwards.
The signal was picked up by a nearby passenger transport, which stored it, carrying it onwards to its destination, a heavily populated industrial world. Thousands of ships swarmed around the planet’s orbit, each of those receiving the message from the transport.
As the ships left, heading to whatever destination they had, they began to launch their own drones, sharing the story across the stars. Slowly, bit by bit, Michaels story legend to spread.
The Sword tore back into real space like a blade, sliding softly through reality like it was flesh. It raced across the black, engines at full burn, as if the ship was enjoying its newfound freedom. Its hull glistened in the light of a new star, a jewel hanging in space.
Michael stretched his arms, the jacket of his suit pinching tight to his skin. He was sure it had shrunk in the wash, the makeshift stitching under the arm already coming loose. After his discovery of the washroom, Michael had spent the rest of the week and journey exploring the ship. He actually felt useful for once. Kestok and Skorra were constantly poking around inside the ship’s walls, Meggok was obsessed with the kitchen, Aileena and Brekt were still searching unsuccessfully for weapons, and Mellok had become engrossed in the records stored in the Swords memory. Exploring every inch of the enormous ship was something he could contribute to. Clive had stated it wasn’t necessary, that he could tell them anything they needed to know, but had quickly been proven wrong when Michael had found the sleeping quarters. The beds were mounted high up on the walls, unsuitable for anyone who wasn’t a naturally inclined climber. There were mountings for more beds much lower down, but it looked like they had simply never been installed. He, along with the rest of the crew, had kept sleeping on the Seeker, rather than risk falling out in the middle of the night.
“Transition to real space complete,” Clive said. He was no longer a large floating head. Instead, he had improved his control to a point where he could form a vaguely human body, though it was still oddly blocky, moving in sharp jolts. “Ooh, this isn’t uh, well what we expected.”
“Of course, it isn’t,” Michael said. He was sat in the command chair on the bridge. No-one else seemed to be interested in using it. “I told you it wasn’t going to pan out, Mellok.”
“The records say there is a shipyard here,” Mellok said, his voice raised in protest.
“Thousands of years ago! There could be anything here now.”
“Cut him some slack,” Brekt said. The mercenary’s dulcet tones had a way of calming things down. It was a skill that seemed off for a warrior until Michael remembered that Brekt had mentioned having a frankly absurd number of kids. “It’s a better idea than travelling around randomly at least.”
“That was your idea,” Michael said.
“Yes, and I’m willing to admit, this was better. Still, I wasn’t wrong, we wouldn’t have this ship, or saved those people otherwise.”
“Yeah, they were real thankful for that. Clive, what is here? Can you put the external cameras on?”
“Sure thing, captain.”
“Not the captain.”
“You’re sat in the captain’s chair?”
“Look, let’s not keep giving me titles I haven’t earnt. Stick with Michael, please?”
“Yes, captain,” Clive said.
Michael shook his head despondently. “The screens?”
The orbs mounted in the walls glowed, projecting the external display. There was something in orbit, but it had seen better days, fragments of metal spiralling out from the gargantuan derelict. It was horseshoe-shaped, metallic spires jutting out at odd angles. It could have been a spaceport, once, Michael was willing to admit that. Now it just looked like a haunted dead ruin, a long-abandoned remnant of the ancient past.