Chapter 13: Fever Dreams

Morigin?! Morigin?!!

The smooth, metallic female voice whispered to him from beyond a dull, throbbing glow. But the glow felt warm, inviting. What happened? Where was he? A pain stabbed at him. Thoughts hurt. He felt the world lolling around him drunk on moir wine, staggering to find sense of things. But the harder he tried to focus, the more pain stung through him.

Finally the dull glow opened up, pulling into a memory. A planet. The stark white glow of Spectre. He remembered it well. Around the planet and the whole system, slag-colored rings of debris circled in orbits and stretched between moons on great belts of starship debris. He could see the scrapper ships docking to massive clusters of mangled steel and technology, all centuries old. Scrappers in atmosphere suits bubbled out of the scrapper ships, armed with halo torches and tow cables. Like colono ants, they scampered over the chunks of debris, cut off pieces and guided them back to the cargo bays.

Scrapping was a hard life. Morigin knew that. He spent a good portion of his life there collecting scrap, hauling it to depot cruisers and getting paid squat for it, then blowing it all in the station pubs and picking fights with noob scrappers. He thought things were turning around when he found her. Putting down a third double shift in a row and on a solo show, he found a largely intact Bulsa cruiser, roughly fashioned after the Lodan Airshark.

It was love at first sight.

Immediately, he sensor tagged the ship, marking it as his own private salvage, a scrapper's right and unwritten law. Clamoring abroad its hull, he ran his gloved hand over its talonsteel curves. The hull had plasma burns and heat blisters pocked all over it. In one place, a massive breach had burst through the side – big enough, when he floated over to it, he and another scrapper could have climbed through no problem. The death shot he thought. A glimmer of pain and sympathy ran through his mind. At the time, he hadn't noticed those early, fleeting feelings he had for the ship. Nor did he know they grow to the point they would.

The inside looked worse than the outside if that was possible. System consoles melted into fleshy bulbs, cracked screens, panels burst open, wiring and coolant piping hanging from the ceilings and walls, floor panels ruptured and bent. Standing there, the hum of his environment suit echoing in the cabin, he muttered to himself, “Need to get this hull patched up first. All new wiring. Environment systems. A new reactor. Some brand new halo boosters. It'll be a lot of work. No doubt about that.”

Morigin looked at the massive cracked viewscreen and sensed a voice behind it. The voice of his ship. He ran his hand across the control console like it was brand new, like his hands were made to run those controls. The ship's reactor had long since died, but he sensed a breath or two left in the walls.

It took nearly a full Spectre year, to retrofit the hull after he installed the new reactor. There had been the central hole that Morigin thought was created by a fiorgel missle of some kind, but he remembered at the time he found it, he couldn’t actually place the type of energy used to raze the ship. Although salvageable, the ship’s existing hull was fabricated with tempurion, a suitable alloy, but not the make-up necessary for the types of runs Morigin planned on making. A bulky alloy, tempurion was used in many destroyer class ships, meant to deflect long range plasma bursts.

Morigin hadn’t planned on meeting any warships face-to-face. He wanted stealth. He wanted his ship to be able to slip in an out of ports unchecked, unnoticed and easily forgettable. Talonsteel would do just fine – it looked like fabrikore, a widely used hull metal, but its composite had the sneaky ability to scatter particles and waves, while being highly chemical and heat resistant. Talonsteel would do very nicely.

Every week, he purchased insignificant amounts of talonsteel from multiple different credit accounts and had it shipped to Spectre. He knew ordering a vast amount would draw attention to himself, as would numerous shipments paid for by one account. Within the year, from the outside, his ship looked brand new.

Inside, however, was a different story. Morigin floated in the destroyed cabin. Wiring sprung from virtually every panel like wild tanubird hair. Standing there in his envirosuit, Morigin looked at the mess and almost wanted to quit. There was so much work yet to do. On the floor beneath his feet sat two jannies, or maintenance droids, magnetically stuck to the floor panels. Small, thin and dome-shaped, jannies were constructed to fit into the spaces of starships other beings couldn’t reach. Both droids had all their tools sprung out on tiny, but sturdy robotic arms, doing a systems check – irons, welders splicers grips, everything whirred and clicked and then hid beneath panels in the droids’ bodies.

“Okay boys,” Morigin told them. “We have to get the environment systems going on the temp COM system. Get some air pushing down from above so we can a have a semblance of gravity and of course breathe. I don’t want to mess with all this wiring in an envirosuit. Damn things give me the heebies.”

Both droids emitted holographic blueprints of the ship, beeped and rolled off on their magnetized wheels in opposite directions.

Once the envirosystems were online, the rest of the interior work went smoothly. Morigin remembered submerging himself in the panels and consoles of his ship, sometimes only having his feet jutting out in order to repair all the wiring. The jannies were there helping too, often wheeling by his feet, only to stop and look at the feet to ascertain why they weren’t connected to a body, then wheeling on to replace a microboard or conduit panel.

While entangled in the massive ship console, Morigin busily repaired some connections and remembered that he had an odd feeling at that part of the ship. He had spanned over to the underconsole where the new COM system he purchased would be installed. He felt a near emotional pang that he thought emanated from the ship, when he noticed the absence of the COM, both the heart and mind of any ship. Now in that emptiness was a faint green glow, even though no hardware was underneath there to glow. He took it as a sign.

At that moment, he thought perhaps even starships had souls, personalities, spirits and he often felt during those rebuilding years as if something had been watching him, speaking to him through subtle air currents or electricity discharges. He couldn’t explain, but there was a presence there with him and the jannies, a presence he grew accustomed too and often spoke to before the new COM system was even installed.

Installing new wall paneling in the cargo bay, Morigin asked the ship, “What business you think we should get into? I know I’ve been a scrapper for as long as I know, but, I just want a change. I want to travel. How about you? You’re not built for freight, but you got a nice-sized cargo bay. We could install some smuggling panels if you’re feeling naughty?” Morigin stopped pressing the trigger on his fastening tool and looked around at the room. All alone. He smiled to himself.

Another day, Morigin was mainlining the plasma cannons into the COM circuitry, when he started another conversation with the spirit in his ship, “Now, I know these cannons aren’t that big. And I’m sorry about that. But you’re a lover not a fighter. We’ll be in and out of most skirmishes. Stealth, lady. That’s what you’re going to be all about – gliding seamlessly, smoothly, quietly, effortlessly from port to port – not a wary eye on the look out for you, no one noticing you. We’ll be a shimmer on the gleam of everyone’s eye. The second-take. The mirage. The ghost in the corner. That’s us, my dear. Lovers. Not fighters.”

In the washroom, he fastened the last bit of plumbing to the basin. Lying flat on his back and welding the pipes in place, he said, “Gotta look good for my girl. Need a washroom to clean the morning crusties from my eyes. Plus, I know you may not like this, but I can be quite a drunkard at times. I like the bottles and all the fires within them. I’ll try to go easy on them, because I know you’ll hate to pick up after my trashy self, but I just wanted to tell you about it. I don’t want anything to come between us.”

The day the new COM system arrived, Morigin slid it under the cabin console. Ten phetas computing power. Way more than he ever needed, but he wanted the best for his girl. The last piece to the remodel, Morigin had relished this day for five hard-worked years. Over that time, he had come to know his ship fantastically and intimately well. He called her Jade, short for the Jade Tendril, named after the ghostly green glow under the console and the wisps of ghostliness he felt in her, her tendrils wrapping around his body, speaking to him, caressing him.

Sliding the COM system in place and fastening the connectors, the underconsole lit up in bright green light. That time Morigin didn’t say it loudly to the ship and the jannies scooting about, but he said it silently to himself with a hint of sentimentality to it, “Good morning, Jade.”

After crawling out of the console and fastening the paneling in place, Morigin looked up at the shimmering green viewscreen, watching the systematic scrawl of binary and computing languages flash across the screen in a boot sequence.

Then he heard it - the first thing his beloved ship said to him as matching language appeared on the screen, “COM system online. Temporary com system offline.” Morigin expected a more graceful, polished, pretty voice, but Jade’s first words were spoken with a steely coldness that reminded Morigin of a computer. He made a mental note to get a personality patch quickly.

She continued, “Reactor online. Operational systems online. Environsystems online. Navsystems online. Weaponry online. Shielding online. Secondary protocols booting. Assessing profile.” Morigin saw a small, green light flashing high above the viewscreen. Jade’s visual actuary. “Good morning, Captain,” the ship replied.

Morigin felt affronted. “You can call me, Morigin,” he said to the ship. “Data records indicate name of owner to be Captain Morigin Tunney. As is accustom to human social custom, do you not get addressed by your first name as entered in the system, Captain?”

Morigin blushed to himself, alone in the cabin. On each side of him, the jannies sat immobile, staring up at the huge glowing viewscreen. He looked down at them, embarrassed that, in his haste, he inadvertently entered ‘Captain’ in the name field. “No that is perfectly alright,” he told Jade. “The error is mine.”

But deep down he felt this exchange as their first in a long line of dry banter between the two of them, and even though she hadn't yet become what he knew her to be, he couldn’t help but smile at the unintended, dry, logical humor of the situation. He had never felt this way about any ship and he had been in hundreds of them. The others, he determined, didn't have spirit. This ship did.

Spirit. Something about that word stuck with Morigin.

After his celebration bender, he had picked a fight with a Perado. Took two hits of his stinger. That night Telo saved his life. He spoke to Morigin about the loss of faith and belief in greater forces, divine forces stronger than any science or technology the GSA could muster. He had mentioned that it left the galaxy, the universe without a spirit, that somewhere, actually everywhere its spirit remained, just unnoticed and unfound, ignored and forgotten.

“You do know how that planet got it's name, right?” asked Telo that night.

Morigin had been groggy. Tired. The stings drained him. Plus, the moir wine always left him with foggy deliriums. “They say their was a huge battle here. Something happened. I've heard stories, but every one is different. One said this used to be the center of an older, greater civilization that was lost in the battle. Other stories said this is the place God died. I even heard a freighter captain tell a yarn about a great magnetic force drawing every ship, every city, every piece of machinery in the galaxy to one point to destroy it.”

Telo laughed while he soaked more bandages in biotics. “All are true in some fashion. Spectre has its place in history. It's a an old scar that many people don't like to talk about.” Telo placed more bandages on Morigin's neck. “This place was once the center of a great civilization led by a god named Ruktuu.”

“A god?” asked Morigin.

Telo laughed again. “Yes. A god in a way. If you saw him, the light emanating from him would blind you, the song vibrating from his voice would deafen you and the entire galaxy trembled in his presence. Ruktuu was the last of the godkings, bearer of the Gardaan, or the “Skin of God,” a powerful set of armor crafted from the divine energies existing across the universe. Legend says the Gardaan is bestowed upon the one being with the power to actually control it. That being is the antennae for all the divine energies in the universe. A god in many ways.”

“That's ridiculous,” Morigin had said. “Someone that powerful would have been recorded, remembered. We would have heard about it.”

“It's only ridiculous,” Telo said. “Because it has been forgotten in the pages of time. See as with all great civilizations or kings, with great power comes an overpowering thirst to possess it by others. At the height of his power, Ruuktu was assaulted at every angle by warring systems looking to capture his power. That's what lies around the rings and belts of Spectre – an entire galaxy of the finest fleets, sent there to raze the god planet and strip him of the Gardaan.”

“I'm guessing that didn't end particularly well,” Morigin had said.

“No. For neither side. Oh, the razing fleets had their work cut out for them. I believe they never fully understood the power the Gardaan possessed. Much like this civilization, their entire existence was supported by science and technology. They had massive battleships with capital atom cannons and fighters so thick they blocked out the suns around Spectre. The largest battle in the galaxy also ended the quickest.

Ruktuu knew what came to his world. He had foreseen it. At the attack point, he drew in all his power and vaulted it toward the heavens, eradicating every ship, every pilot, every soldier, weapon and bomb in a three system radius.”

Morigin remembered this part of the story the most, because it completely dumbfounded him at his core. There was no way one being could possess or harness that kind of energy. But the way Telo told it, it was as if he was there. Morigin tried to find the insanity in the old man's word, but he could find none, just a barely audible whisper, emanating from the energy of the universe, creeping into his ear and saying, “Listen. He speaks the truth.” And up until that point in his life, he had never heard anything speak to him like that on that level. It gave him chills. He felt compelled to ask, “But then what happened to the Gardaan? If he stopped the incursion, what happened to him?”

Telo washed his hands in a basin and said, “Ah, yes. The best part of the story. Yes. Ruktuu, the last bearer of the Gardaan, possessed the massive offensive power of a god, but he also possessed the crushing empathy of a god as well. So distraught over the trillions of lives he extinguished in one second, he flew to the center of the galaxy, where he focused all his divine power on his own being, shattering it and the precious Gardaan into a fiery supernova. From that time on the Gardaan was extinguished from history, mostly out of ignorance. Those that knew what happened perished in the cataclysm. Sure there were pockets here and there that told stories about it, but the belief never returned to the height it once was. The legend of the Gardaan slipped from memory and became a trivial piece of lore passed down from crazy old men.”

“But what of the Gardaan?” Morigin asked. “Surely it survived.”

“Yes it did. Backwater stories of people finding and claiming the known six pieces of the Gardaan slipped in and out of depot stations and systems throughout the galaxy. More often than naught, the possessor of a piece of the Gardaan perished under its power. Only the most powerful wills can bear it. Weaker beings slipping on a piece of the Gardaan we're known to be consumed by it, their atoms literally falling apart. In this fashion, the pieces work to find their way to the next god king.”

“But why me?” Morigin asked. “Why do you ask a drunkard scrapper to come with you on this odyssey?”

“You remind me of my son,” Telo said. “You’re much older, but I see him in your eyes, in the way that you are so sure you have a grasp on the things around you.”

“Well, why don’t you ask him?”

“I can’t,” Telo rubbed his face in embarrassment. “I’m ashamed. All his life, I was away. Digging up crusty artifacts on desolate worlds. Oh, how I longed to have him go with me, but his interests lied elsewhere: girls, trino boarding, sailgliding. He just never had it in him – what I do. I tried. I told him everything about the Gardaan. Even the mysteries behind where I thought the pieces resided. They were long tales and stories that I knew bored him, but I told him everything to convince him to join me. But he wouldn’t. I couldn’t fix the resentment he carried for me. After his mother died, he no longer had a reason to stay home. He jumped the first cruiser to Param Eon. He always liked that blasphemous city – all the lights, the scum, the chaos, all banded together with technology to do all the work.”

Telo’s face grew angry. “Chipping the rock and soil, straining your back and feet, breaking a hard sweat and getting your face straight into the dirt. Now that is work.” Telo held up his hands and looked at them. “They are magical gifts of evolution, hands. Yet no one dares use them to lift anything, push a dolley-crate or pull a cargo net. No. There are retroes and bots to do all that.”

Telo pointed to Morigin’s head. “And this. The mind. Are you aware that the Flagellans use almost 67% of their brain capacity? Humans historically use 11%. Do you know what lies in that other 89?%?”

Morigin shook his head, listening intently to Telo’s empassioned diatribe. “Power. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Superior body control. Rapid healing. You name it, the mind can grasp it and control it. Why do you think the flagellan live so long? They have such control over their own bodies they can increase their healing factor, raise their immunity levels and cheat death. Have you ever seen an elder Armanon?”

Morigin shook his head again.

“They control protein levels in their blood to the point of massive, instantaneous muscle generation – nearly quadrupling their strength in a matter of minutes.”

Morigin finally broke in, “What you’re talking about isn’t possible? Sure through tech, but not naturally.”

“That’s what you’ve come to accept. Millenia of denial, loss of faith and ever-increasing reliance on science and technology. Long ago these physical abilities existed and were evolutionally unlearned, forced back into the recesses of the mind and body. And it’s not just humans, either. All species have become subjected to this de-evolution.”

“How can we relearn it?”

“Meditation and concentration,” Telo said.

“But there’s a missing element.”

“Which is what?”

“Faith,” Telo had said. “Everything we are capable of requires energy, a certain symbiosis with everything around us, the universe, what our ancestors would refer to as God.”

“Ruktuu?”

“No. He was thought of as a god-like being, not the divine creator and energy source fueling the entire universe – a concept not easily grasped by species of today. That is what is needed to complete the evolution. Meditate, pray and tap into that symbiotic energy and should you be able to attain oneness with the universe, you are granted access to its energy, to its power. Many species involuntarily tap into this – their recession away from faith left trace physiological patches that enable that connection. You can see it in highly-intelligent, passive, non-tech-centric species.”

“How do you know when you have reached ‘one-ness?’”

Telo smiled and said, “You know that rush your mind feels in a life or death moment, the panic of when death gets so close you’ll wish anything to prevent it from happening and then miraculously it happens?”

Morigin thought about his fight with the Perado, it’s stinger jabbing into his neck. He could feel the bony barb wrenching underneath his skin. At that very moment, he remembered his mind made a call out, a silent tendril of thought to an unnamed listener, asking to make the stinger stop. He had never really noticed before.

Even though it happened in a cellular second, a span of time unimaginably small to even conceive, when that stinger pierced him, he could feel the presence of the sender, himself, and a larger, more spacious presence of a listener, and at the notice of that listener, Morigin open his eyes and saw Telo, lifting him up and carrying him away from the fight.

Back in Morigin's room, Telo saw the recognition in Morigin’s eyes. “See. You have made the connection before. That is what I speak of.”

Morigin shook his head like he had come out of a life long fog. “So you’ve spent your whole life – missed your only son’s childhood, missed an entire marriage – in pursuit of a sacred suit of armor, the claimed “skin of God,” from a god – the all-creator, divine force that is the beginning and end to everything there is in the universe – that no one believes exists anymore.”

Telo nodded at Morigin’s long-winded comment.

Morigin wanted to disbelieve it all. Even his comments weren’t aimed to convince Telo that he was crazy, but to convince himself that everything he heard was ash on the wind. He rubbed the welt on his neck and still felt the bony burr of the stinger.

“Plus, you have a new ship,” Telo said. “A ship that, if I heard you in the pub correctly, just had a contraband COM stealth patch installed.”

Morigin smiled. He liked how this old man thought. “Yes. I just got it installed.”

“You weren’t planning on doing a little smuggling, were you?” Telo asked.

Morgin smiled broadly and said, “Not at all.”

...What're we going to do?

...Jade?

...I'm searching...setting course for Odiacz.