Tales from the Inbox: Last of the Silent

2946-08-07 - Tales from the Inbox: Last of the Silent

Today's entry comes to us from Lukas R., a freelance explorer contracting to support the Naval Survey Auxiliary. Lukas returned from one of his trips with an unexpected passenger. Mira Silent, as this passenger became known, is now a fairly prominent musician and entertainer at Mirabel. Lukas assures us he secured her permission to send in the story. Evidently, she never talks about the sort of people that populated her world; I suspect she didn't know herself. Either she was the last child of a small remnant group that survived whatever disaster befell the city, or she was a child brought along on a group expedition to recover or plunder the site, and her elders met a grisly fate. Either way, she never knew the dreary ruin Lukas describes when it was full of life.

While I have no proof of any of this, I can find no obvious reason to doubt his account. Mira's datasphere hub neither contradicts nor corroborates Lukas's tale.

Lukas stared into the fog, waiting for his survey drones to return. No sound broke the oppressive stillness of the dead city, not even wind hissing through the open windows of the corroded prefabricated buildings. The only motion in view was the gentle fluttering of scraps of torn cloth hanging from some of the windows.  

Though Frontier legends spoke of the existence of the Silent Planet, Lukas hadn’t known what “silent” would mean until he found the place. Even a flock of bird-like creatures soaring in close formation through the misty sky made no noise as they passed over the dead towers. Each time he shifted his footing on the roof from which he’d deployed his drones, the groaning of the pitted sheet metal seemed a roaring intrusion. 

Finding the Silent Planet had been an accident, just as it was in all the stories. The world didn’t appear on any navigation chart, and he’d stumbled upon it in a nameless system while performing an asteroid-mining survey. Most likely the builders of the four and five story towers of prefab modules had intended their colony to be hidden. Perhaps they had been Penderites or practitioners of some other isolationist philosophy, seeking to cut off all contact with the Core Worlds. Perhaps the town had been a hideout for pirates and their families, or perhaps a damaged colony ship had limped into the system, stranding a few unfortunate settlers in its enduring, oppressive silence. 

Though there was no way of knowing how long it had been since the builders had left or died out, Lukas saw nothing to indicate human habitation within the nameless town in his own lifetime. Neither had he seen any human remains – the inhabitants had vanished without a trace, leaving him to guess at their fate. Even decayed and moldering, the ruins hinted at a colorful, vibrant community, at a life interrupted. It was as if a city of thousands had simply walked out into the mist, never to return. 

The hum of the returning drones deafened Lukas, though the machines were considered quiet and unobtrusive anywhere else. After each of the three fist-sized machines circled its owner and docked to the charging ports on his pack, Lukas turned around and clambered down the way he had come. The pack's computer would soon spit out a map of the ruins, hopefully pointing the way to any easily-salvaged valuables the lost inhabitants had abandoned. The timetable on his contract prevented him from staying planetside long enough to perform a full search of the ghost town. 

In fact, as Lukas stepped over the ruins of some sort of polymer-printed furniture, he wondered why even people with something to hide might have come to such a dreary place. There were dozens of genuinely pleasant worlds on the Frontier just as secluded as this one, without its dreadful, dead aspect. Despite this, thousands of people had lived, worked and loved – and apparently died – in the shifting mists and constant stillness of the Silent Planet. He couldn’t imagine anyone, even religious ascetics, choosing such a life if they had any other choice. 

As Lukas returned to the crumbling pavement of street level, he spotted movement in the corner of his eye, in the shadows of a yawning doorway. Grabbing at the carbine slung under his arm, he leveled the weapon at the disturbance and brought the lights on his suit to full power. The harsh blue-white beams found nothing within but the far wall and a few rotted heaps that might once have been furnishings. 

Shaking his head, Lukas brought up the map his survey computer had rendered to orient himself, heading toward the location determined to be the highest likelihood of portable valuables. The silence was getting to his nerves, but there was a simple explanation for it: the world had a fairly standard biosphere, save that none of the wildlife had ever learned to use human-audible sound. 

Lukas had only moved a few meters down the weed-choked thoroughfare before he spotted motion again. Something withdrew around a corner ahead of him as he approached. Carbine ready, the explorer activated his helmet recorder and followed the disturbance. Despite his uneasiness, Lukas knew good data on the planet's wildlife might be as valuable as any salvage. Whatever it was seemed skittish, so he probably wasn’t in any danger. 

"Let’s have a look at you." 

Immediately Lukas regretted voicing the thought; even a whisper under his breath echoed thunderously off the weathered walls looming on all sides. In an instant, the dreary, damp atmosphere became forbidding, even hostile. Lukas wondered if it would be wiser to abandon his hopes of easy profit and head back to his landing craft. After all, the legends said the Silent Planet was cursed; even if he didn’t personally put much stock in such mysticism, the legend might have arisen from very real danger. 

Turning around to head back to the edge of the settlement where he’d landed his spacecraft, Lukas found himself face to face with a tattered black cowl. He yelped in surprise and fell backwards, dropping his carbine to the moss-covered pavement. 

The figure didn’t react to Lukas’s alarm except to beckon with one shrouded arm. Lukas followed its gesture and saw something slither into a shadowed alley. He didn't get a good look at it, but he sensed he didn’t want to – the hooded being might have saved his life. Lukas nodded silently, trying unsuccessfully to see the figure's shadowed face. 

Satisfied, the figure dropped its arm and, leaning heavily on a walking-stick made out of a bent piece of piping, hobbled away down the lane. Not even the foot of its cane made any noise on the crumbling pavement. Forcing himself to be quiet, got back to his feet and hurried to follow. 

After a few turns through the labyrinthine ruins, the figure ducked through a tattered cloth curtain covering a doorway, and Lukas, not without reservation, followed. Inside, behind a neat stack of ancient-looking plastic canisters, he found the embers of a small fire glowing in a scavenged metal bowl, their heat keeping the dampness at bay. Soot-stains on the ceiling above suggested the place saw regular use as a shelter, and a pile of cloth near the fire probably served as bedding. 

 The cowled figure dropped stiffly into a seated position near the fire-bowl and cast back its hood. In the red glow of the embers, Lukas saw his rescuer’s face – a woman's, angular and painfully thin, her mouth twisted into a permanent scowl by a wide scar across her lips and left cheek. Lukas guessed based on her limping gait that the scar was only the beginning of her ailments, even though she didn't look a day older than thirty. 

Lukas approached the fire cautiously. The woman had no obvious weapons, but that didn’t mean she was harmless. "Who are you?" 

The woman took a few seconds to remember her voice before she answered in a smooth, melodic voice softer than the most careful whisper, and totally at odds with her battered appearance. "I am... Mira." The name seemed to be something dredged up from a vast distance. "I am the last." 

“I’m Lukas.” Lukas sat down opposite Mira, setting his weapon aside. “What happened here?” 

The woman only shrugged – whether out of ignorance or apathy, Lukas couldn’t say. “This world ever hungers. Do not feed it. Even the mists sometimes devour.” 

Lukas shuddered, remembering the unmentionable thing he’d glimpsed slithering into the shadows. There might be treasure in abundance on the Silent Planet, but he didn’t fancy tangling with whatever had shredded Mira’s flesh. “I don’t plan on it.” 

Mira laughed quietly, though her mouth could not form a smile to accompany the sound. “Others like you have come. Loud, awkward, confident. They rarely leave.” 

“Then why are there no spacecraft?” Lukas held up his wrist unit, activating its screen to show the map his drones had created. Even the pads of the colony’s crumbling spaceport lay empty save for a few hulks picked clean of parts long before the colony’s end. If Mira was telling the truth, there should have been dozens of abandoned ships around the dead city. 

Mira leaned forward to scrutinize the map, grasping Lukas’s wrist with one painfully thin, long-boned hand. Despite the poverty of her situation, the folding screen on the wrist of his suit didn’t seem to surprise her. 

After a few moments, she let go and returned to her previous position. “I cannot say. Perhaps in time even machines become food.” 

Lukas looked at the map himself, looking for structures that might be plant-choked spacecraft which his drones had misidentified. After a few moments, though, he decided such analysis would have to wait until he was safely back in orbit. If the planet’s ecology did eat spacecraft, he was operating on borrowed time. “Thank you for your warning, Mira. I think I’ll leave, and you’re welcome to join me.” 

As Lukas stood, Mira stood also, taking up her bent walking-stick once more. “Join you?” 

“Yes. I can take you off this world.” He tapped the location of his ship on the map. “Can we get here?” 

Once again, the woman scrutinized the map. “I can help you reach your ship, but why would I leave?” 

Lukas shook his head, incredulous. "Why would you want to stay?” 

“Because I am the last.” From the look on her face, Mira seemed to find this question as ridiculous as he had found hers. 

“You’ll still be the last when you leave.” 

Strangely, this answer seemed to satisfy the crippled survivor. “Perhaps that is so.” She raised a hand to her face, running her fingers along the scar marring her otherwise noble visage. “Or perhaps there will be another to take my place.” 

Lukas suddenly felt uneasy at the idea of having Mira aboard his ship. What if she wasn’t what she seemed? What if she was as broken mentally as she was physically? Still, he had offered, and couldn’t bring himself to take it back. 

In Lukas’s hesitation, the last inhabitant of the Silent Planet made her decision. “I will go with you, spacer Lukas.” As she spoke, she seemed to stand up straighter than before, as if remembering that she was a human, not a mere scurrying prey animal for the planet’s skulking terrors.  

Lukas nodded, shouldering his carbine. He kept his reservations to himself; he had offered her an escape, and he could not now recall his words. 

“Follow. Be absolutely quiet.” Raising her hood once more, the scarred woman hobbled toward the curtain-covered doorway and back out to the misty street. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Rosetta Halo

2946-07-31 - Tales from the Inbox: The Rosetta Halo

This entry was submitted by Jozefina U., who has already been featured in a Feedback Loop episode of the vidcast. Jozefina is currently the mayor of a town of about 1,500 settlers on the frontier world of Botterhill, which is primarily known in the Core Worlds for the discovery of the so-called Rosetta Halo, a functional artifact likely built by the so-called Xenarchs. Jozefina and her two associates sold the artifact to a consortium of Core Worlds research universities for an unbelievable fortune in 2931, and it has allowed xenoarchaeologists to construct a partial translation of the Xenarchs' written language.

In this submission, Jozefina discussed the situation in which she discovered the Rosetta Halo. This story is probably household knowledge on Botterhill, but here in the Core Worlds, the haphazard and accidental nature of the find may come as a surprise to many of our audience.

Jozefina was the first to rappel into the grotto. Proper explorers would have brought a gravitc lifter or even a sled, but her little band was anything but, and had to rely on cable and tie-down spikes hammered into rock the old-fashioned way. It was all their lighter’s fabricator had been able to churn out on short notice.

“What’s it look like?” Anita called down, her head silhouetted against the tiny oval of sky at the top of the shaft.

Jozefina saw nothing but damp, dripping darkness in every direction, so she activated the lights secured to her wrists and swept them around in a circle. The cave was just that – a cave. It was damp, but fortunately the floor was not underwater – thin runnels of moisture trickled along the floor into a crack near one wall. “It’s big, but there’s not much to it.” She called up. Some of the rocks reflected the light oddly, but that was because they were damp and covered in delicate traceries of flowstone. The cavern wasn’t unpleasant, but compared to some of the larger cave networks around the settlement, it was fairly uninspiring. The region’s largest web of caves had made travel media all the way back in the Core Worlds for its size and grandeur; this one would not even warrant a footnote.

“Damn.” Walter muttered, his quiet voice echoing down. Jozefina knew that to Walter, every cave was a potential motherlode of alien artifacts or palace-like cascade of ancient stalagmites that would bring in endless tourism. He set his hopes high, and they were always dashed.

“We’ll, give it a good once-over look anyway.” Anita replied. “I’m sending Walter down.”

The rope jerked as the man hooked his harness into it and began to rappel down after Jozefina. She stepped away to give him a place to land, wandering down the cave’s long axis. Her attention fell on egg-shaped boulder roughly the size of their lighter’s cabin, which sat on a pile of smaller rocks. It was smooth across half its surface and marked with flowstone across the other half. The flowstone seemed to embrace the boulder, as if cradling it. Jozefina deployed the camera unit attached to her helmet and lined up for a few photos. The climb would at least not be a total loss; a few close-ups of the odd formation would be perfect fodder for her datasphere media feed.

As she moved from one interesting perspective to another, Jozefina stepped on something that snapped underfoot. Bending down, she found a long, straight stick of the local wood-analogue, its end sharpened into a point. “Odd.” She said. The wood was damp and probably worm-eaten, but that didn’t explain the sharpened point.

“What was that?” Anita called down.

Jozefina stood, still holding the stick, but she never got around to answering her associate's curiosity. The cavern was suddenly illuminated with a warm yellow-orange light. Confused, the amateur explorer looked up and saw a ring of bright motes slowly orbiting the egg-shaped boulder. There was an almost hypnotic pattern to the lights – and as they moved, they sharpened and grew more numerous, becoming symbols. Alien symbols.

“Woah!” Walter exclaimed. Jozefina turned around to see him disconnecting from the line, gazing up at the symbols. “Jackpot.”

“What?” Anita called again. “Did you use a flare, Joz?”

The flowstone flaked off the rounded bolder in great, brittle sheets, and Jozefina saw intricate carvings below. In the seams of the carvings, she saw the gleam of bright metal. “No.” She called up distractedly. “Found something.” She stepped forward, arm outstretched.

“I wouldn’t touch it.” Walter warned.

Jozefina touched it anyway. Nothing happened; the symbols did not change or vanish. The artifact – for that was certainly what it was – was warm to the touch, and vibrating faintly.

“What do you think it is?” Anita asked.

“Hell if I know.” Jozefina replied. “Get a claim marker from the lighter. This is ours now.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: Ven's Angel

2946-07-23 - Tales from the Inbox: Ven's Angel

The spacer who provided today's entry was in his twenties in 2918, when he lived with his mother and sister on Ceres. His presence there during the last year of the Ceresian habitats was very easy for me to prove. I was also able to find stills of Angels inspecting the refugee camps on the worldlet, before it was evacuated, though Ven S. did not provide them. His story of a close encounter with an Angel holds up. If the date he remembers is accurate, the events below took place less than three weeks before the evacuation of Ceres.

He's now the captain of a small vessel running passengers and small cargoes between the worlds of the Silver Strand. As far as I can tell, that's all he does in the Strand; this is consistent with the evidently bare-bones lifestyle he seems to live in his public datasphere footprint. He's only an occasional consumer of Cosmic Background content, but he read another of my posts on the text feed where I mentioned the audience demand for Angel-related stories, and decided to send his in.

Though I did not clear this story with Simona Durand, our local Naval Intelligence attache, Ven's story does not contain anything they tend to find objectionable. Unfortunately, since we published what we knew about New Rheims, Simona has not been quite as responsive with our requests as she has been in the past; I do hope that our studio's decision to post what we did about New Rheims has not damaged our working relationship with their representatives.

Ven hurried home as soon as he’d heard the news: the Angels were coming.

The streets of Afolayan Park were no filthier than they had been the day before, but with such esteemed visitors on their way, the slums attached to one of the oldest and largest habitats in the system seemed intolerably unkempt. Afolayan had once been one of the best off-Earth habitats in the system, he knew, but the War had changed many things. Refugees from the devastated regions of Earth had come to Ceres as they had flocked to the other less-affected habitats in the system, and Afolayan, Ceres’s largest habitat, had opened its doors and allowed Earth’s unfortunates by the thousands. Ven and his family had been among these refugees who’d settled into the hastily-assembled accommodations installed in what had once been the mining city’s park district, a hundred meters below the Ceresian surface. 

Ven’s father had hoped the chaos on the old world would ease, and that in a year or two, he would be able to return to Earth and continue his old life with his family. The authorities had promised that they would put right the regions ravaged by Rattanai armies, and that the refugees – no less than two billion strong when the exodus finally petered out – would be slowly returned from exile.

Ven’s father and grandfather had died waiting, watching in dismay as fifteen thousand refugees resettled in Afolayan Park became used to their squalor, fighting for a small number of issued luxuries and a chance to respond to job postings offered by the city’s permanent population of miners, engineers, geologists, and metallurgists. Afolayan Park was all but walled off from this population; without a pass, none of the refugees living inside could get past the well-guarded checkpoint leading into the city proper.

Ven had been born to the Park, the second generation of interminably dispaced persons. Now his twenty-fourth year was approaching, and still there was no news of resettlement for anyone in the slums. As he clambered excitedly up the irregular, often-repaired stairs of the building to the family’s small third-floor residence, he wondered if he would die under the enclosed, artificial sky of Afolayan Park, too.

“Ma!” Ven called as he entered the residence. “Did you hear?” In the dim light, he could just see the urn containing his grandfather's and father’s ashes set on a shrine-like table in the corner, surrounded by flickering holos.

“Hear what, Ven?” His mother, who'd always longed for a life she never knew under the warm Ceylon sun of her grandparents, seemed more sickly than usual, sitting by the tiny, dingy window with her cracked reader-slate.

“Angels are coming. Where’s Jaya?”

“Ven, the Angels wouldn’t come here.” She replied with a sad smile. “Jaya has been out all day. Probably spending time with that Sidley person again. She seems to like him very much.”

Ven winced. His older sister had grown into life in Afolayan Park better than their mother, but not much better. He didn’t have the heart to tell his ailing mother that Sidley was a narcotics-pusher who worked for one of the more violent street gangs in the Park. He tried not to think about what striking, dark-haired Jaya was doing to get her fix, in absence of credits or luxuries with which to buy Sidley's wares. “The Angels are coming here, Ma. To the Park. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Why would they do that?” She shrugged.

“I don’t know.” Ven admitted. There were rumors, but nobody knew for sure. He set down the bag he’d carried back from the distribution center. “Here’s what we got this week.”

The sight of the half-full bag animated his mother, and as she rifled eagerly through it, Ven took her place at the window, looking down at the street. A pair of thugs ambled by, covered in garish nanotattoos identifying their allegiance. Ven watched them check the electric scooters chained to the front of the building across the street for anything worth stealing, then slouch against the façade of a building while shouting rude things at a trio of young women who had tried and failed to avoid their notice. Ven remembered what Afolayan Park had been like when the refugees had first come – it had been grim, spartan, but orderly and hopeful. Now, it was still grim, and still spartan, but the order and hope had suffocated below so many meters of rock.

“Any media stamps?” Ven’s mother asked hopefully.

“Couldn’t get any.” Ven replied, turning around. Escapism had, he suspected, was the only reason his mother hadn't died young of heartbreak; he would doubtlessly be sent to trade other non-essentials for media stamps with other residents in the next few days.

When Ven looked out the window once more, the street thugs were gone. Since this usually meant trouble, he frowned, pressing his face to the polymer panel to see down the lane in both directions without seeing anything that might have spooked them. “They’re here.” He whispered to himself.

“Hmm?” His mother, still sorting out the rationed items, didn’t look up.

“Angels.” Ven replied, as the building shook again, a little stronger. Around a corner down the street, a trio of Solar Refugee Authority men in full riot gear ambled into view, weapons ready. SRA almost never ventured deep into the Park in such small groups, but Ven already knew they weren’t alone.

Stooping to avoid a web of datalink cabling strung across the intersection, an Angel stepped around the corner following the three men. It was almost five meters tall, and it looked nothing like the Angels Ven had seen in datasphere media snippets. Where the Angels which had penetrated the Rattanai defenses of Earth to hold the line against their armies on the ground had been bulky, heavy-looking frames, this one was spindly and graceful despite its size, its faceless head turning side to side as it examined its surroundings. A tubular object like a weapon barrel protruded from its left arm, but Ven thought the metal-sheathed alien looked like more of a scout than a warrior.

No, he realized, as it deferred to its human escort’s choice of direction. It wasn’t a scout. It was an emissary. Nobody had ever seen an Angel without its armored suit. The secretive xenosapients had saved humanity twice in recorded history, without asking anything in return, but no human had ever seen the face of an Angel.

The SRA men led their charge toward Ven, and the towering alien ambled along in their wake, the few refugees on the streets gawking up at it. Ven noticed that its lower legs were reverse-articulated, like those of a bird, and that though its footsteps shook the foundations of Afolayan Park, it avoided stepping on any of the litter and debris choking the street. 

“Look at that.” Ven whispered. His mother paid the spectacle no mind, even as the floor under her feet rumbled.

The alien stopped halfway down the street and pointed to one of the buildings, its head tilted in an obvious question. The men turned around to address it, but Ven had no way of hearing what was said.

Its curiosity satisfied, the alien followed its minders down the street. With a thrill of something like terror, Ven realized that it would soon pass right in front of his window – and that its head would be almost on level with him. He wondered if it was better to hide and let it pass, or to try to get its attention.

The Angel’s eyless gaze swept each sagging building, each alley, each pile of refuse. Though it was impossible to determine what it thought, Ven hoped it was disappointed. He hoped that it knew that most humans lived better than the Afolayan Park refugees, and that the Park was, at least supposedly, a temporary situation.

Finally, when the shuddering grew too extreme for her to ignore, Ven’s mother joined him at the window. “That’s an Angel, is it?” She asked rhetorically. “Hmph. Doesn’t look all that special.”

“It’s amazing.” Ven replied, not really paying attention to her.

The Angel stopped in front of the window, looking down at a refugee who gawked back up at it from the side of the street. Its domed head was only two meters away; Ven wondered what was behind all that metal. Was it really an alien, as the datasphere media said? Was the Angel merely a machine, serving the interests of distant masters? Or was it something else entirely, something which hid within an indestructible shell to protect its surroundings  rather than itself?

The pedestrian moved on, and the five-meter-tall creature looked up to Ven’s window. The young man gasped, his blood seeming to turn to ice in his veins, even though he had no way of knowing for sure that the Angel could see him, there was no doubt in his mind that he was observed. Though it had no eyes or expression, its attention speared Ven, and he felt as though every layer of himself was being peeled back for its silent inspection. 

Before he had time to even gasp, Ven saw the Angel turn away, and the uncomfortable impression vanished. Gulping a few breaths, Ven watched in silence as it followed its SRA guides to the far end of the street at a stately pace, then turned out of sight.

“I wonder what they mean by bringing that thing here." Ven’s mother muttered.

“It means things are changing, Ma.” Ven guessed.

He wasn’t wrong. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Day's Last Glow

2946-07-17 - Tales from the Inbox: The Day's Last Glow

This is an odd sort of submission. Tacita A, the person who sent it in, is a crew tech aboard a merchant hauler, the Izz Al-Din, but she was not a spacer her whole life. Several years ago, she left her home and family on Herakles for a life on the space-lanes. This is the story of how she left her planet-bound existence, and chose a new path, with the help of an Angel - or what she considers to have been an Angel.

I confess I have my doubts. As you will see, her account is unreliable, and it does not agree with other accounts of the Angels in many respects. It is my personal view that the appearance of a hermit was embellished by hallucinations - the Heraklean uplands attract many solitary settlers, and many of them don't bother to register their presence with the local authorities. All the same, her story is compelling, and the audience is encouraged to decide for itself what it thinks of her very unorthodox description of a fleeting Angel encounter.

Tacita lounged alone in the entrance of her thermal tent, staring up at the mountains and basking in the slowly fading narcotic warmth of yet another dose of annuska. Soon, the glow would fade enough that her problems of the world would return, and another dose would be required to prevent her from climbing to the top of a nearby sheer promontory behind which the sun had sunk and leaping off. For the moment, while the drug still plucked pleasurably at her senses, she was at peace.

Annuska had been Tacita’s vice as a youth, but she’d sworn it off the day she’d met Mac. He had never known about the habits she’d left behind. Even through the weeks Mac spent half a world away at Athenea and the entire months he’d spent off-world, she’d remained strong. In the darkness of the lonely, quiet nights when the remembered bliss of one more run of annuska promised to help her get through, she had pushed away the temptations, remembering that when Mac returned, he would chase the temptations away. He always did.

Now, of course, things were different. With annuska dulling Tacita’s senses, she could pretend that Mac wasn’t three hundred kilometers away in another woman’s bed, his wedding band hidden away in a little-used drawer he didn’t think anyone knew about. For the moment, she could pretend the medical bills from Martin’s lighter accident weren’t coming due, and that her brother, who had hung on for six weeks after the crash despite horrific injuries, would in two days be buried in the same cemetery as her parents. She could even pretend she hadn’t seen the marriage termination forms on Mac’s list of datasphere retrievals, and that somehow, everything was going to be okay.

Movement on the promontory scattered these detachedly morose thoughts. Tacita watched dreamily as a feral Heraklean mountain goat, its large, crooked horns jutting into the sky, appeared at the precipice, staring down as if surveying its territory. Heraklean goats were bigger than the original Earth stock, and in the dying light, she thought the creature quite majestic, even though her primary interaction with their kind was to eat their meat on special occasions.

When the trembling returned, and thoughts of Mac with another woman in his arms began to hurt again through the drug’s fading veil, Tacita rummaged through the tent to find where she’d put the rest of the annuska she’d purchased. 

When she found the tin, it was lighter than she expected it to be. There was only one dose left – one final brief window of pure bliss, before it was time to decide whether to head up onto the promontory and end it all or to head back to town and bear the unbearable. From a corner of the tent, Tacita's comm blinked furiously, indicating many unanswered messages and dropped connections. Even the thought of sifting through these and finding Mac’s divorce notifications and paperwork made her feel sick.

The remaining annuska promised one more reprieve, and to this refuge Tacita gratefully fled. Licking her fingers, she rolled them through the tin to collect the remaining dregs of golden powder. As a pleasurable tingling began to seep through her fingertips, Tacita rubbed the powder on her forearms, her neck, her collarbone, to speed its absorption. The trembling began to recede, as did all her troubles receded into the background. With a high-pitched, eager sigh, Tacita exited the tent, intent on feeling the starlight on her skin, but her limbs betrayed her before she made it two steps from the flap, and she fell to the soft, spongy moss, giggling at the absurdity that she had thought it possible to walk during the beginnings of an annuska run.

At first, she tried to watch the stars come out, but the dancing and cavorting of the fickle clouds obscured her view. Still lying on her back, she craned her neck to look at the promontory upside-down. The big goat was still there - either in reality, or in the warped world of the annuska run. It must have noticed the antics of the human far below, because it was watching her, just as she was watching it. Tacita, still giggling, waved lazily at the animal. It didn’t react.

As she watched, another figure climbed into view at the top of the ridge, standing next to the goat. It was a man, or a giant, clad in a suit of grey metal that reflected the rays of the day’s last light, which still fell on the far side of the peak. He was wearing a helmet or a cowl over his head, and the animal seemed not to notice him, though he stood only an arm’s reach behind it. Despite being unable to see the figure’s face, she thought him familiar; perhaps she had seen him before, in another hallucination.

As the solar disk sunk further behind the ridge, its reddening rays seemed to shine through the giant on the promontory. The metal suit seemed to become plates of interlocking Gothic armor, and his headgear became a helmet with an angular faceplate like the prow of a seagoing ship – Tacita had seen an ancient helmet like that in a museum once, many years before. But even as she wondered what this change might mean, the figure changed again – the armor faded and vanished. Underneath, she saw robes like those worn by the monks who lived nearby at Reynders Point. Unleashed from the confines of armor, a pair of giant, dark wings unfurled from his back. The giant's skin was deathly pale, and dark, loose hair hung from his head, hiding much of his face. He was looking down at her, and she no longer felt like waving.

Stepping up to the very edge, the winged man gripped the goat by its horn – any mere mortal that would dare to do the same would have been hurled off the edge by an effortless toss of the huge goat’s head, but the animal submitted instantly - and gently pulled it back from the cliff. As he backed away out of sight, the figure never let his gaze wander; his hair-veiled eyes stayed locked on Tacita until he disappeared from view. As he did, the sun, clinging to the horizon beyond the mountain, finally slipped below, and night came to the tops of the peaks in the distance.

Tacita blinked several times. Already, the annuska was fading again. She’d had hallucinations under its effects before, but she couldn't shake the feeling that the winged giant had been real. Still half-numbed by the drug’s afterglow, she staggered to her feet and stumbled toward the ridge where she’d seen the figure. Perhaps he'd left footprints or some other mark she could see to prove there had been someone there. It was a matter of life and death - hers - that she try.

If she had been sober, the steep hike would have taken twenty minutes. After staggering uphill through the dusk, at times forgetting where she was going and why, at others seeing her destination with crystal clarity, she finally reached the summit nearly an hour after she set out. Her tent, now far below, was illuminated by its own photocells, preventing it from being swallowed by the darkness creeping in from every side. Having brought no light except the blue glow of her wrist-computer screen, she dropped to her hands and knees, looking for any sign of heavy boot-prints that might prove that what she had seen was real.

As she searched, a deep, bone-shaking rumble filled the air. Tacita looked up just in time to see an orbital launch roar past, its belly seemingly close enough to reach up and touch as it climbed upward to the stars. There was a landing pad for orbital craft in her home-town, but it was almost never used – more likely, the spacecraft had just lifted off from the larger burg of Corinthea, many kilometers away. Though it was only above her for a fraction of a second, Tacita was enamored with the vessel's clean lines, its spotless, gleaming hull panels, and the way its rumbling vibrations filled her bones, cancelling out for just an instant the persistent post-annuska tremors.

Just as soon as it had come, the spacecraft banked sharply upward, and its roar faded, its glowing drive dwindling until it was only a moving star, then disappearing from sight entirely. The silence rung in Tacita’s ears, and she was alone again on the ridge. With nothing left for her in the world, the stars, slowly multiplying in the retreat of the day’s last glow, seemed a sympathetic audience to her tragedy.

As she turned her eyes back to the ground, Tacita spotted a single impression, which might have been a footprint. She touched the oblong patch of crushed moss and dirt gingerly. Though far from conclusive, Tacita decided this was enough proof for her - there had been someone on the ridge after all. She wondered where the giant had gone – there were no other prints, no lights, and no paths leading in any direction.

“Running won’t help.” She said, realizing only after she spoke that the words were meant to address the departing orbital craft and the giant man, who in her drug-addled mind were one and the same. "Other worlds are bound to be just as cruel.”

Even though it was true, it seemed like a pathetic counter-argument. Her choice of two unpleasant fates had been given a third option, and it didn't matter to her whether this had transpired by chance or through the work of an inscrutable guardian angel. If her life on Herakles was crumbling, why was she bound to it? “Fine.” Tacita said into the darkness. “We can try it your way.”

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