Emancipation

Chapter 3 : Learning Curve

Chapter 3

The “field” rarely involved actual fields for Brenda. Usually she only personally investigated Dark compounds and cities where stealth was a necessary tool. For this mission though, Brenda stood on the wooded border of a large field. A group of hairy humanoids were sparring in the well-trampled grasses and herbs. A woman dressed in a black dress quite possibly made up of darkness itself paced in front of the combatants. That was Mira Black. The humanoids all possessed a pelt shaved down to nearly bare skin. That marked them as sanruphrup, as did their fifth digits. The species that they originated from only had three fingers and a thumb, like the embodiment of some kind of living cartoon. The sanruphrup were all at least five feet tall and their fur ranged through various shades of browns, grays, greens, and black. All of them wore uniforms of various shades of gray.

Mira watched the combatants with relish as they tore at each other ruthlessly. One pair drew Mira’s close attention, a tall sanruphrup in near black sparred with another dressed in pale gray. It was an unfair fight, or it should have been. Somehow the low ranking and slightly shorter sanruphrup was not only holding its own but beginning to take the upper hand. Brenda watched the fight with interest almost as focused as Mira’s. The rest of the combatants stopped fighting and made way for Mira to watch the mismatch more closely.

The sanruphrup dressed in pale gray landed a stunning blow to their opponent’s throat. The tall one staggered back, trying to regain his breath. He fell to his knees gasping futilely. The smaller sanruphrup kicked the other in the face and even at her distance, Brenda could hear his nose breaking. The taller sanruphrup fell to his knees. The other paused in their attack.

Mira clapped slowly, “Tyrulan, finish him!”

The sanruphrup stood immobile. His opponent began to recover. Brenda could feel it as the lower-ranked ruphrup realized that if the higher-ranked sanruphrup got to his feet, he was dead. It didn’t take a single moment’s calculation for the lower-ranked sanruphrup to deal out a killing blow.

“Good job Tyrulan!” Mira clapped excitedly. She gestured at Tyrulan with a hand covered in the dark mist that she wore. The darkness swirled from her fingertips off to surround Tyrulan. Then it returned to her fingertips. Tyrulan now wore a uniform a shade darker than his dead opponent. He felt the fabric of his uniform and looked at Mira in surprise.

Brenda forced herself to remain a silent observer. She could feel echoes of Tyrulan’s guilt and self-doubt, two things that marked him different from the others in the field. Brenda snapped an image of the winner, making note of his name, not that she was likely to see him again. She thought she could almost see something noble in the pale tan fur of his face. The rest of his fur ranged through shades of brown in more of an agouti coloration. If he grew his fur out, he might be attractive by ruphrup standards.

Brenda had worked with the ancestral species in resistance against dark control of their world. Some ruphrup temped by the Darkones became the first sanruphrup. Aside from the extra digit and close-shaven fur of the sanruphrup, there had to be other differences. Brenda had witnessed this scene of gratuitous violence in an attempt to discover if some other rumored differences were true. She had seen the sanruphrup using telekinesis in their sparring matches and several sparring matches had ended with one sanruphrup landing a debilitating psychic blow on their opponent. The psychokinetic abilities of the ruphrup were limited to an overall empathic bond to the life forms around them. Ruphrup found it difficult to hurt others of any form. Mira’s sanruphrup seemed to lack completely even the non-psychokinetic form of empathy.

Mira whistled and opened a portal. The sanruphrup filed through the portal ahead of her. Then she went through it, and it closed behind her. They left behind the body. Brenda cautiously stepped out into the field, maintaining her cloak of invisibility. She kneeled next to the body which had only begun to grow cold. She gathered samples of its blood, fur, and other tissues to compare with the Preserve’s species database, and the known genome of the ruphrup. Then she focused on teleporting home.


* * *

Fiona loved video games. They were nearly impossible for her to cheat at. As long as you didn't count her supernaturally fast reflexes and near-instantaneous hand-eye coordination as cheating. The ones and zeroes flowing through the machines weren't decipherable to her in any way. For Fiona's bizarre gift to work, she needed a flesh and blood creature. The video games taught her nothing with a touch and shared no silent thoughts or emotions. Fiona spent a bit too much time with Super Mario and Pacman, to the exclusion of other things. The day of the week she was supposed to go to Karate class she dressed in her gi and rode to the arcade. She liked her gi, the fabric was thick and covered her well. It wasn't the least bit likely that someone casually walking through the arcade would bump her and ruin her arcade mojo with some new skill or emotional problem. It was a good gig she had set herself up for.

About ten minutes before she was due to be at Karate class she decided to play Dance Dance Revolution. After a few minutes, she was getting hot. She took off the top of her gi, stripping down to a tank top. She hung the top on the back of the machine. Then she hit the start button. Absorbed by the patterns of the game she didn't notice a disturbance deeper in the arcade. After quite a bit of yelling a young man with long greasy black hair and a worn jeans jacket came running down the aisle. He stumbled into Fiona, making full flesh contact on her shoulders with his sweaty palms.

He was the cause of the commotion. Big Tyrone, who regularly ran a book on some of the better videogamers had hired this young man, Shawn, to fix the odds on a game between two of Big Tyrone's favorite gamers. The game had nearly impossibly gone against plan and Big Tyrone was after Shawn for his failure. Big Tyrone didn't know how Shawn fixed the odds, but now Fiona did. She had acquired the ability to manipulate both the essential ones and zeros within the video games' brains and the electricity to the machines. At first, she had little control over it, so little that she blew half of the fuses in the arcade and had every machine spitting out tickets randomly. Shawn gathered himself in the drama and looked at Fiona. Fiona sensed he didn't know how but that she was the cause of the chaos that would give him a chance to escape.

Shawn saluted her and ran for the front door. Fiona grasped the steady bar of the game trying to keep herself upright. She felt every electronic device in a three-block radius and could turn them on, off, or inside out with just one uncareful thought. This was a power she needed to get a handle on quickly. As chaos reigned around and within Fiona, she struggled to find herself. Her mother did not. She paraded through the arcade, Fiona sensed her coming with an edge of her awareness but couldn't do anything about it.

Fiona's mother's righteous rage filled Fiona as her mother grabbed her by her shoulder, "Fiona Maken! Imagine what I thought when I showed up at your Karate class to watch you practice, only to find you hadn't been to one lesson."

Fiona couldn't respond to her mother, lost within the inner workings of Mario Party Arcade Edition. Her mother shook her slightly and her anger fluctuated. Soon Fiona's mother began to realize Fiona was having one of her less than normal moments. The family action plan for these moments was to get Fiona out of the public. Mrs. Maken snatched up the top of Fiona's gi and yanked Fiona by the arm out of the arcade.

Fiona's mind spun the whole way from the arcade to the dojo. It wasn't until they arrived that Fiona realized that her mother was taking her in despite Fiona actively experiencing one of her "special moments." Her mother pulled her from the car and drug her into the building. The instructor was just dismissing the class. "Sensei Gordon, this is my daughter Fiona, I enrolled her in this class two months ago. I want to introduce the two of you!" Sensei Gordon bowed to face Fiona and held his hand out to her. He wanted to shake hands, bare hands. Fiona backed away as far as she could while her mother held her by the shoulder. "Fiona show your sensei some respect!"

Her mother knew exactly what she was asking of Fiona, they had discussed what happened when she touched people, especially ones with new skillsets. Fiona bowed deeply, but that wasn't enough for her mother. The rest of the class was lingering feasting on the embarrassment of an undisciplined peer. Her mother glared at her when she straightened back up. Her mother wasn't going to let this go. Tentatively, Fiona reached out and shook the sensei's hand. Decades of martial arts practice and study poured through Fiona's every cell. The idea of chi swam around the mechanics of moving electrons and altering temperatures, somehow the combination giggled an idea into her mind. Her mind and eyes fastened upon a stack of folded towels in the corner, with just a twitch of a thought she knocked it to the floor where they fluttered into a disorganized pile. It made her dizzy with all of the connections it made in her mind at once.

"Kenzo! Get the students to help you fold those." Sensei Gordon said. "Fiona, let me see what you know about karate."

Fiona shook herself from the ethereal universe of moving molecules. She realized her belt was tied all wrong she untied it and retied it properly then she took up a proper stance at attention. The instructor nodded at her to continue. She blinked and went through the first three sets of motions he taught his classes. Again he nodded. Fiona let loose with all the moves she would have learned over the course of the course her mother paid for. Then she started the first sequence of his intermediary class. "There is the problem Mrs. Maken, you enrolled Fiona in the wrong class. You should have enrolled her in my intermediary or advanced class. I hold both on Thursday evenings at five-thirty."

Fiona's mother opened her mouth and closed it. She glared at Fiona. "I will have her here at five. She can help you set up for the class." Her mother took that as finished and went out to the car.

"Don't worry it will be a lot more fun than it sounds," Sensei Gordon winked at her and gestured for her to follow her mother.


* * *

Jess Foreman ran her fingers through her fluorescent pink hair. She couldn't wait until it grew out. That was what she got for playing a game of truth or dare with a sentient AI that had access to her full bio. Her frustration of the moment wasn't with her hated hair color, it was with the mechanisms of an antiquated bureaucracy. Jess was revolutionizing the establishment of remote monitoring networks in vulnerable inhabited planetary systems. Still, she had to dot "i"s and cross "t"s to get the resources she needed to implement her changes. She had signed on to be a factor in part out of gratitude at their rescuing her from the end of the old omniverse. But even she had to admit that a large part of her desire was the sheer adventuring involved in acting as a field factor. Between struggling to get resources for her projects, and leading a team of probationary factors, Jess spent more time riding a desk than the high of exploration and adventure.

Adja, Jess's healing hound partner nudged her elbow with her nose. Jess, they just began discussing our new parameters. Jess shook herself to attention and recentered her focus on the staff meeting around her.

"… These new monitor systems have the potential to expand the planets we protect beyond our field factor numbers. What is even more important, Mira Black is unaware of this new set of procedures. Let me pass this discussion to the system developer, Jess Foreman," Mae Amante, chief of domestic operations for the Preserve said by way of introduction.

Jess stood and began tapping on her tablet to bring up her current specification recommendations on the screens in front of people, "We have increased the request for higher-level AI programs. I have in place a team of programs interviewing and sorting applicant AI's into appropriate teams, but I need faster production of the probe clouds and the central core computers. There are billions of worlds out there. I have teams trained in placements and nothing for them to place. Frankly, each system we put in has the coverage of a network of factors being placed on a single world. We need to work smarter not harder."

Mae smiled at her, "People I know you all feel your resource requests are important, but with the possible exception of the production of more molecular reprinters, I am afraid I have to place a priority on Jess's requests."

An entire orchestral outbreak of protests broke out throughout the room. Mae let it go and Jess sat back down to check her messages for the daily stats on AI applicants.

A loud squelching sound erupted from the display screen speakers and everyone fell silent throwing their hands over their ears. Those who had leaped to their feet to protest sat down. All eyes in the room turned to the entrance, Brenda Bench, chief of field operations for the factors based in Refuge stood with her finger poised above her tablet, "Sorry, I am late, I had to get checked through medical. I am so glad everyone is playing nicely this morning. Whatever you were arguing over, Mae is right, we're doing it her way. Anyone want to protest further?" Brenda moved to tap her screen again. No one raised protests.

"Good, now I have an assignment for teams including healing hounds, most especially for the hound portions. I want the hounds to use their invisibility to investigate Mira's sanruphrup operatives. I need to know how loyal they are and whether or not they would make good double agents. As you all know any factors we have sent in have been discovered rapidly. I think part of that is Mira used to be one of us and she knows all of our tricks."

Jess heard the request and turned to Adja, "You could volunteer, I can handle the kids and the systems you go ahead."

The 'kids' would just love to hear you call them that. Adja tapped on her tablet with her nose. I volunteered, happy?

Jess smiled and nodded.

"A few things about the sanruphrup, mostly rumors, they could be psychokinetic, telepathic, shapeshifters. They have one finger more than the original species, the ruphrup. Their training regimen is brutal, the strong readily kill the weaker ones."

Adja raised a paw, Do they eat the weaker ones, because that sounds an awful lot like how hellhounds are trained…

"Adja, you would have to tell me. I have seen one training session in a field. They left the dead body," Brenda answered.

"So they don't just train in the dark compounds?" Jess asked.

"Apparently not," Brenda nodded.

Jess considered joining Adja if they would be able to do some of the recons outside of the dark compounds.

I'll head out in the morning, I should have a report within a few days. Adja commented telepathically.

"Thank you, I'd like you to run point on this, I'll have the other volunteers check in with you," Brenda stated tapping at her tablet.

Jess felt a sudden reluctance from Adja, which faded. Adja wanted to be an administrator as much as Jess did.

"Excuse me, but can we get back to resource allocation?" One of the production technicians grumbled.

Jess toggled on her earbuds and pressed play on her playlist, returning to the business of sorting programs into appropriate teams.


* * *

Scriptures and the approved histories blended into one another. Both were considered equally sacred. It was nearly impossible to find anything in the records that contradicted them or shone a negative light on any of it. So a short scroll titled "The Purge" surprised Nova. She said nothing to the monks piling readings on her desk, but from the first paragraph, she could tell this was not something the clerics would have her learn. Centuries ago there had been a movement to abandon the strict adherence to religious doctrine.

"The heretics were shown the folly of their desires. Those who espoused equality were drawn and quartered into four equal parts. Those that bespoke the fair sharing of knowledge was crushed beneath the weight of the religious texts they would ignore. Those who spoke against the infallibility of the church were shown that they to required air provided by the creator to breathe. They had heavy stones tied around their ankles and were thrown into the depths of the sea…" Nova flinched the rest of the scroll was simply a list of the sins of the heretics influencing the torturous means of their deaths. Anyone even suspected of heresy died. The Purge led to the deaths of one-eighth of the population of the colony by the time it was over.

It was graphic and frightening, "Is this for real?"

A monk stepped up and looked over her shoulder. He read for a moment and smiled, "Yes, it was a thorough cleansing. Only the faithful survived. We kept ourselves pure for the founders and creator! Make sure you tell them that when you report back to them. I wish I could have been there and seen the triumph of the faithful!"

Bile rose in Nova's throat. The monk seemed giddy at the idea of all those deaths. "One-eighth of the population was murdered! With those numbers, there is every chance you would have died."

He stared at her blankly, "I am one of the faithful! I would be entirely safe. Unlike women who do not know their place. Two-thirds of the cleansed were unruly women who thought themselves as important as men."

"They are the ones that bear the children…" Nova mumbled.

The monk glared at her, "There was much talk like that at the time of the purge. Everyone knows that there are no children without the holy seed born by the man."

Sensing danger, Nova hastily agreed, "Of course not."

The monk smiled at her and went back to sorting through scrolls and piling the approved ones in front of Nova. There was no end to it.


* * *

Raen followed Master Honor Baggood through the tangled streets along the waterfront. Raen was careful to keep Honor in sight. Without him she was completely lost, she had never been to this part of the city. It was located on the western edge of the city. There had been no reason to venture this far out.

Honor stopped in front of a long wide boat docked along the river. “Here we are.”

Raen shifted her small bag of possessions on her shoulder and adjusted the strap of her messenger bag. “We just get on?”

Honor turned to look at her and a kind smile landed on his face, “Don’t worry. Traveling by barge is far less dangerous than what we are on our way to do.” He tossed his duffle onto the barge and carefully stepped aboard. Then he turned to help Raen. The other members of the expedition were either already aboard or were actively boarding themselves.

Raen shifted her bag off her shoulder and handed it to Honor, playing for time. When it came to the river, Raen knew next to nothing. She had only ever had the concept of water in a small controlled form like a fountain or the water pumped through a courtesy spigot. Until now she had never seen the raw untamed chaos of a natural watercourse. This one was quite the introduction. She could barely see the other side of the river and the color of the water was silty brown as opposed to the clear tame water that came from city sources.

Briefly, the thought that it could swallow her passed through Raen’s head. What was she to do if she fell off the boat? “I don’t think I can swim sir.”

“Raen, it’s okay come aboard. I’ll help you with a life jacket. You will be perfectly safe,” Honor stated.

Raen respected the man for all he had done for her but this water was the dividing line between the civilized city she had always known and the wild places beyond Marketown. The emotion causing Raen’s legs to lock and refuse the three steps onto the boat was alien to Raen. It was something more than the fear of not finding a meal or being scooped up by unscrupulous people wanting to sell her as a slave off-world. This was blinding, paralyzing terror.

“Raen Davis! Get your butt on this boat!” Honor yelled abruptly.

In the year since she had met him, he had never spoken so harshly to her. Her automatic reaction was to comply. She was on the boat before she could think. Raen stood on the slightly swaying deck in front of Honor. He had a broad grin on his face and was holding his hand out to someone. One of the other members of the expedition handed him a puffy orange vest. “Put this on.”

Like an automaton, Raen put the vest on. She struggled a bit with locking the clasps closed across her chest. Honor helped her with them and adjusted the vest for comfort. “There safe as a bun in an oven. Captain, you can cast off now. We’re all aboard.”

Raen took the few short steps to the center of the barge and sat as far as she could from any of the sides of the boat. This was going to be okay. Raen sat still and closed her eyes, letting the slight motion of the deck rock her in a nearly soothing way. Focus, she thought. She needed to prepare herself for their mission. She was one of eight people on this expedition to catch specimens of the planet’s venomous snakes and other creatures. The apothecary guild specialized in milking the venom. They both used it in the medicines they produced and shipped it off-world to satisfy the empire’s need for the complex chemical compounds found in the venom.

The gentle swaying of the deck and sensation of motion reminded her of a dream she had often had when she was younger. In the dream, chaotic swirls of light flashed and shimmered around her. Vertigo gripped her stomach churning it and what little it held. Abruptly darkness and stillness dropped on her like a heavy curtain. Her universe contracted around her. She felt the barest whisper of fresh air flowing in her nostrils. A tiny bubble of moisture wet her lips. She sucked at it and drank deeply fresh cool water.

Raen licked her lips and felt the humidity of the river. In that dream, the water had soothed her. She had never felt fear in that dream, no matter the strange chaos of it. Raen opened her eyes, her apprehension shoved to the deepest part of her stomach, where it barely itched. She got up and walked to the side of the boat. She watched the water as the boat glided through it. They were traveling upstream. Honor said it would take two days to get to their base camp on the other bank of the river. That was okay since all of her meals on this expedition would be provided. If the meals she had shared with Honor on other occasions she worked with him were any example the food would be plentiful.

Fish surfaced in the river, drawing Raen’s attention. What small portion of them she saw left her in awe of their size. She had only seen small fish in the market stalls. A hand rested on Raen’s shoulder, “Impressive isn’t it?”

Raen looked over her shoulder to see Honor. “There is nothing like it in the city,” Raen replied.

“That’s why it was named The Great River. They say you can see it from space. It is one of the reasons our ancestors chose to colonize Tradehub.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, not every world has such an abundant and easily accessible source of water. Between that river and the placement of Tradehub in the galaxy, the colonial authorities decided to colonize this planet. They sent ahead terraforming ships to release the plants and animals we would need several hundred years before they sent us to live here. Somehow something about this planet caused rapid evolution and the ecosystem was almost unrecognizable to the colonist when they got here,” Honor told her.

It was information she didn’t have. With no formal education, she had a surprisingly complete knowledge base when it came to natural laws, the sciences, mathematics, and some languages. The holes in her knowledge mostly existed in the areas of history and culture. “I didn’t know that.”

“With everything you have locked up in that wonderful brain of yours, that statement surprises me,” Honor tussled Raen’s hair, “Come on, the captain’s wife has lunch on the table.”

Raen looked out over the river for a moment and then followed Honor and her stomach towards the smell of some kind of fishy stew.


* * *

The scent was faint, but Beaoul could detect it as easily as if it were illuminated by a neon sign. She trotted off in the direction the smell was strongest. The smells of the dark compound were mere random noise in this exercise. She took time to recognize each one and push it from her awareness. That was death by cholera. This was a rotting feline. There, her quarry was down that hallway. The lighting in the hallway was such that the color of everything was skewed just a few shades to the green. Human servants of the Dark queen complained that it made them queasy. The walls and floor were also set at jarringly wrong angles but were painted in such a way as to make most lifeforms dizzy and disoriented. Most hallways of the main dark compound had been designed to be independently disorienting, from empty hallways echoing with the screams of torture victims half the compound away, to walls and floors coated in caustic liquid. The normal Beaoul took for granted was seriously stunted.

Ahead, yes, ahead, Beaoul could hear the quarry running away down a slippery inclined hallway. They would not, could not return the way they came, and Beaoul knew where that hallway led. She darted through corridors and halls, down an uneven stairway. She waited in the room the slippery inclined hallway led to. Her quarry still fought gravity and tried to reverse course. The hall's incline got steeper the lower you went, and the lower walls were narrow and coated with caustic slime. Beaoul heard her quarry scream. They had reached the lower walls. They wouldn't be long in arriving. Beaoul took two steps backwards and reveled in the smell of chemically burnt flesh wafted down the hallway along with the clearly identified scent of her quarry.

The young man she was after tumbled bleeding into a pile at Beaoul's feet. Beaoul looked him over and felt a mild wave of empathy for him. She was supposed to drag him back to Mira's throne room by the leather strap dangling from the collar wrapped around his neck. She was supposed to deliver him up live for torture. He was already in agony. much of the skin on his arms and lower legs melted from the caustic chemicals dripping from the hall's walls. Beaoul knew his pain was nothing on what Mira would inflict. Impulsively, Beaoul wrapped her jaws around his neck and gave the short sharp shake that would brake his neck, killing him.

It was all she could do for him. It was the first time she had killed a sentient being. Deep guilt tugged at her gut. She reminded herself she had given him mercy despite the directions Mira gave her. She locked her jaws around his neck and began dragging him towards the throne room. The route back was much shorter than she thought it would be. She had caught up to him in an excellently short time. The trip back to the throne room would have been quicker and less exhausting if she were dragging a live and self-propelling quarry. What was she going to tell Mira? Perhaps he broke his neck landing at the bottom of the slide. Beaoul would lie. Either she would be successful in her deception or she would be unsuccessful and Mira would punish her for not lying well enough. Beaoul drug the young man's corpse across the jet black stone floor of the throne room. She released his neck from her jaws, and the sound of his skull impacting stone echoed through the chamber.

Mira lifted her head from where it rested on her palm and the arm of her throne. "Color me disappointed Beaoul! What happened? I thought you would bring him back alive."

Beaoul gathered up the concept that he had fled down the slippery hallway, and that he had landed wrong. Wordlessly she pressed the images on her queen and mistress.

"Oh, so he suicided. Well, you did catch up to him didn't you?"

Beaoul nodded and projected the image of waiting at the bottom of the hallway for him to arrive.

Mira smiled, "Delightful. You would have cut him off if he hadn't fumbled his way dead. Want to play again?"

Beaoul boldly shook her head no.

Mira sat on the edge of her throne and glared down at Beaoul, "I wasn't really asking."

Beaoul realized she had stepped into dangerous territory by refusing a whim of the queen of darkness. She cobbled together the sensation of exhaustion from chasing him down and then dragging his corpse back. She emphasized the effort of dragging him back up the stairs. Balling that all up she pressed it from her gut straight at Mira.

"Tomorrow then?" Mira seemed overly eager.

Beaoul managed a weak nod and wag of her luxuriously long and unmarred tail.

Mira limply waved her wrist at Beaoul, "Head back to the kennel. Eat up and rest up. Tomorrow I will find you a real challenging quarry!"

Beaoul nodded and wagged again before slowly fleeing the room before Mira could detect the nervous energy of Beaoul's lies.