Tales from Ardulum Read online

  Praise for the Ardulum: First Don

  A glorious love letter of a book, pushing the idea of what space opera can be and who it's written for, utilizing a complex web of science facts and science fiction concepts to ask questions about truth and history and who benefits.

  —Seanan McGuire, author of Every Heart a Doorway

  Award Finalist

  Ardulum: First Don—Forewords INDIES finalist in science fiction

  Ardulum: Second Don—Gold Crown Literary Society finalist in science fiction

  A NineStar Press Publication

  www.ninestarpress.com

  Tales from Ardulum

  ISBN: 978-1-950412-65-5

  Copyright © 2019 by J.S. Fields

  Cover Art by Natasha Snow Copyright © 2019

  Interior Illustrations by Micah Epstein Copyright © 2019

  Published in June, 2019 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at [email protected].

  Also available in Print, ISBN: 978-1-950412-66-2

  Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content, which may only be suitable for mature readers.

  Tales from Ardulum

  J.S Fields

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  The Charted Systems

  Ardulum Timeline

  Mercy's Pledge

  Exile

  Just a Bar on Mars

  Palace Politics

  Youth Journey

  The Gift of Friendship

  Legacy

  Glossary of Ardulan Talents

  Noteworthy Members of the Charted Systems

  Noteworthy Members of the Alliance

  About the Author

  For my daughter. May you one day steal a Buran and see the galaxy you’ve long dreamed about.

  Author’s Note

  If you’re holding this book and reading this, then thank you. This book would not exist without so many, many enthusiastic voices about Ardulum. From the shy fans who sneak up at conventions just to whisper how much they love the series and then skitter away, to the fans who post the beautiful fan art on Twitter, thank you. I’ve read your reviews, I’ve heard your stories, I’ve seen that glint in your eye when you ask about Yorden (because you didn’t really think I’d kill him off, but then again, you don’t know me that well yet, do you?).

  The stories in this anthology serve two purposes. The first is to fill in the gaps in the (now rather extensive) Ardulum timeline. But the second is to give all the wonderful people who have asked for more in the past two years a chance to see the stories that otherwise didn’t really have a place in the original trilogy. Origin stories. Yorden as a central character, being a badass. Atalant and Emn just getting to kiss a lot. The secret life of gatois.

  So, you don’t have to say goodbye to Ardulum just yet. Take one final journey with me on the Pledge, on the Lucidity, on Ardulum itself, and let’s give these characters the send-off they deserve. You’ve earned it. I’ve earned it. Atalant has definitely earned it.

  Oh, and did I mention there are pictures?

  Mercy’s Pledge

  2030 CE

  “Scrub it down. Start with the cockpit, then work your way back. No toilets on this thing, of course, because the astronauts used diapers way back when and most of these old models were just for animals, so that’s a bright side.” The museum curator—a short, thin woman with wavy, brown hair and pinkish skin—produced a half-hearted smile. She tapped a white panel on the starboard flank of the old decommissioned Soviet shuttle. Housed in the warehouse section of some museum in Kaluga, the ship was a Buran model, although it’d been modded so many times since its initial flight that Yorden Kuebrich doubted its insides looked anything like the historic photos.

  “Yeah, I got it. No worries.” Yorden ran his fingers through his beard in what he hoped was an endearing gesture rather than a creepy one, smoothed out the wrinkles on his too-tight coveralls, grabbed his cleaning kit, and walked up the shaky platform steps to the entrance of the shuttle. Cleaning the inside was going to take days, which was just fine. After the year he’d had in the Gaza Strip, not to mention the little heist he was planning, a bit of mindless cleaning while he worked out the details was exactly what he needed.

  He grimaced at the rank smell of old oil and deteriorating plastic as he squeezed through the narrow walkways of the shuttle. Either the Soviets had been a lot smaller back then or Yorden had put on more weight in the past decade than he’d realized. Didn’t matter. Muscle, fat, facial hair…it was all the same when you woke up every morning from nightmares of a friend killed, a family home destroyed, or a passive-aggressive act of one angry government against another. Who was right, who was wrong—it didn’t matter then, and it didn’t fucking matter now. The world was full of old decay. Religious cousins were still at each other’s throats, although now they used words instead of bombs. And it was all stupid because there were actual aliens, turns out, flying around in space.

  Aliens! Yorden snorted as he entered the tiny cockpit and set his cleaning kit down on a metal case. For ten years now, Earth had been part of the Charted Systems. For ten years, fucking aliens had been showing them how to use wormholes and cellulose tech and weird biometals, and here Yorden was, standing in a metal bucket containing a throttle-lever thing and analog controls after having fled yet another country he’d wanted to call home.

  His first home, Poland, he’d left because fuck communism and fuck his early memories of the exorbitant price of meat and his family never getting a condo because the lottery was never in their favor. And fuck the lines. He was glad he’d never had kids, never needed to wait in line for twenty-four-plus hours just to buy a damn doll. Anyway, toilet paper was a goddamned miracle he never wanted to live without again.

  Things got better in the nineties—but he’d been done. Naturally, Yorden had just managed to trade one tortured ideology for another. Israel. Gaza. He was Jewish, in that ham-eating, post-Soviet way. Still, birthright. Homecoming, sort of. It was enough to pull him in. Enough to convince him to try out settling there. That had failed miserably. It was just a different kind of death out there: a faster one, from bullets and bombs.

  That was all over now, though, because of Charted-fucking-Systems-mandated peace, but nothing could erase his memories. Thus, Yorden was back in Eastern Europe, on a dilapidated shuttle, preparing to install the Cell-Tal components hidden under his cleaning kit and in his bag, so he could fly this hunk of metal off Earth and get into the Systems proper. Yorden grinned. Off Earth, out of this solar system, and away from the crush of history. Away from his history. Away from the politics and the false smiles and the lovey-dovey crap everyone spewed now instead of the thinly veiled racist ideology of the past. People didn’t change—Yorden didn’t believe they could, not for a hot minute. Humans sure as hell didn’t change. Aliens might have brought technology based on turning trees into spacefaring biometals, and they might have brought peace, but neither of those came without a price. If he was going to live a lie, then better if he did it on his terms, in space, where it was a hell of a lot easier to avoid everyone.

  So, forget Earth. Forget Mars, even. He’d take “diaspora” to a whole new level.

  “You
doing okay, then?” The curator’s voice reverberated within the metal, making Yorden wince. “Some of that stuff up in there is pretty delicate.”

  “Yeah, I got it! I’ll do the gun turret last since it’s not part of the original structure and looks like it wasn’t put on well to begin with. I don’t know what you guys thought you’d need to shoot with this, other than the peace-toting Risalians that came knocking at our solar door ten years ago.” He paused and considered the walls and his very heavy gear bag stuffed with Cell-Tal tech. “I’m going to have to take the wall panels off, too, to clean. I think you’ve got mice.”

  An expletive came from the curator, although Yorden wasn’t certain what language it was in. Not Russian or Polish—he was sure of that. Definitely not Yiddish. Since she was already upset but clearly not willing to come in and inspect the “damage,” Yorden added, “Probably best to strip her down to the floor and walls anywhere I can. If you’ve got one nest, you’ve got ten, and I don’t think you want to pay a guy to redo wiring, right?”

  “Do what you can and just…make it look right on the outside, okay? No one is ever going to look under the panels. It’s not like this Buran is ever going to fly again. That laser was never even fired, from what I know. It was attached quickly. Apparently, humans didn’t want to give up their guns when the peace treaty was signed. Not that it does any good on a ship that can’t fly.”

  “Oh, she’ll fly,” Yorden muttered. He waited until he heard the door to the hangar slam shut, followed by the screeching of the wide bay doors to the warehouse closing, and then peeled a clump of old metal and coated wires from the wall. He would put it all back together again, snug as a bug. He just needed to make a few modifications of his own first.

  “YOU’VE GOT A week left. Sure you’ll make it?”

  Yorden pretended to look offended.

  The Alusian on the other end of the comm—a biped with purple, furred arms and legs and a smattering of teal scales across the rest of her visible skin—made a sound very much like a Terran clearing their throat. “I apologize for offending, but we do have a contract.”

  “I said I’d do it, so I’ll do it. Calm down, Captain Neigh.”

  The purple arm fur rippled with irritation. “My name is Neganondonu,” she said, curling the U sound up like at the end of a question. “Not ‘Neigh,’ not ‘Donahue,’ and not ‘Meg,’ all of which you’ve used at some point in the last three days. If the Charted Systems is your goal, then your pronunciation range is going to have to get a lot wider. I need those cedar trees on time, and I need the Risalians to not know about it. Can you or can you not deliver?”

  Yorden took a deep breath, staring at the little computer monitors in the cockpit, just about the size of his palm, that were the last parts he needed to remove before installing his own Cell-Tal versions. He could do a week. He only had, what, two days of real work left? And then it was just the mechanics of getting an ancient shuttle out of a museum and into space. He had the chipped trees already. Brought the packets in during broad daylight on a forklift. The curator had asked about five questions before Yorden had flashed her his art restorer’s license. As far as she knew, the wood was for repairs. After all, no one on Earth had any idea yet how cellulose tech really worked. He could have nailed a branch to the wall and called it a biometal for all that most people understood the mechanics. Still, he’d then asked if she wanted to file a complaint with the Risalian sheriffs. She’d backed down. Yorden didn’t blame her. Filing a complaint would result in more paperwork than an injury claim through OSHA, and violent crimes were so rare now that if he was doing something, it was unlikely to be something horrible.

  Yorden wiped his nose on his sleeve. Crime. It’d always been fascinating, what various governmental bodies thought was okay to do or what would get you arrested. The Risalians had simplified everything, and Earth’s population had definitely calmed down…somehow, but getting Spanish cedar cut from the Amazon rainforest was still surprisingly easy to do, even with all the protections in place. The Risalians might have wiped out major crime, but they hadn’t wiped out poverty. The “illegal” gold mining in the region—the Risalians weren’t policing environmental destruction, after all—would have the banks of the Madre De Dios river eroded so far in another decade that the trees would be underwater, anyway. At least now, the trees would be of some use. He could pretend that the ethics of illegal logging bothered him, but memories of gunfire and going hungry still made his hands shake. The trees could figure out how to take care of themselves.

  “I’ve got five eight-meter-diameter trees, flaked as requested, shoved into the newly remodeled cargo hold. The biofilms you lifted from Cell-Tal’s warehouse integrated just fine into the analog circuitry, and the computer upgrades are happening today. It will be done on time.”

  “And the Risalians?”

  Yorden flicked his hand in a careless motion, although his stomach did a little flip. “What interest could an ancient Terran shuttle possibly be to the sheriffs of the Charted Systems? This piece of junk doesn’t even look drivable from the outside, much less flyable. Any scans they do of the cargo will just pull up wood. Hauling cedar isn’t illegal, not even in Peru.”

  Captain Neganondonu’s fur kept rippling, so Yorden sucked in a bellyful of air and tried again. “Look, if I get searched…I don’t know. I’m just an upstart Terran looking to make a quick diamond in the black-market scents trade. I wouldn’t be the first to try to sell Terran cedar as a biological weapon. I’m not cutting into any andal profits—no one in their right mind would touch that fucking tree since the Risalians buy every board of it they can find. It doesn’t even grow on this world—can’t, apparently. Needs some micronutrient our soils don’t have. So, there’s nothing to link me to you, unless you have some ties to whomever lifted the Cell-Tal parts.”

  “The parts went through four couriers. They’re as clean as they can get. You are the only question mark in this operation.”

  Yorden forced out a tense smile. He’d smuggled before, of course, but never anything of this value, and definitely never off-world. Risalians were an unknown quantity, but it was easy enough to pretend they were harmless, even if he did dream about being behind bars, guarded by blue-skinned aliens. Hell, he had a lot of bad dreams these days. Risalians were the least of his worries.

  “I’ve got this. Don’t worry. See you in three days, tops. Kuebrich out.” He turned off the little, round pocket comm and slid it into his coveralls. “Computers, computers,” he muttered. “Two days to get these damn things in.”

  He slapped open his metal toolbox and lifted the top section out. Below were twenty or so sheets of thin biofilm crisscrossed with circuitry Yorden couldn’t even begin to understand, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to install them. He’d been weaned on computers, after all, in the late eighties and early nineties. Cellulose tech was barely in its infancy when the Risalians came around, of course, but Yorden was clever. He’d studied engineering in Poland. His father had been a carpenter. Computer chips were just tiny carvings, and cellulose was just a filament to be wound, same as any wire or plastic. That andal cellulose always felt warm and made the hair on his arms stand on end was irrelevant.

  Yorden studied the cockpit, which was so tiny that he could touch the left and right walls simultaneously. It’d never been meant for human transport, but with the advancement in spacefaring tech in the past twenty years, most of the components inside the cockpit were no longer necessary. He’d already removed the interior side panels, the base metal structure that kept anyone from moving about freely, and most of the center console. He’d replaced the main throttle lever with a yoke—a black one from some old video gaming system, but it fit and had the right parts—and the upper panels were now pressure-sensitive biofilms. Once he replaced the three small computers’ innards with the stuff in the toolkit and got a power source, he could hook the whole thing together and, in theory, the Buran would fly. If he could manage to shove a few chairs into th
e cramped cockpit, it’d be a small miracle, but he’d stand all the way to the Terran Wormhole, and beyond, if it got him off this damn planet.

  Yorden got down on his knees, crammed his hip and shoulder uncomfortably against the starboard wall, and tugged the first archaic monitor from its housing. The metal flaked around his hand, and when he went to flick the pieces off, the glass screen shattered.

  Yorden’s stomach sank. He snarled and ground his teeth as memories crashed around him. Of his friends dying. Of being hungry. Of wanting to be in control of his destiny for one damn minute.

  “Fuck me.”

  Now what? It still had to mostly look like the original, or if the curator did a spot check, she’d flip her shit. Yorden tried for the lower central monitor—much more cautiously—but the same thing happened. Moreover, the left monitor, upon closer inspection, appeared to have suffered from repeated impact at some point. Breathing sideways on it could have sent the thing apart. Fantastic. That left Yorden standing amongst metal curls and broken glass, as well as the little end snips of Cell-Tal bioplastic sheets he’d had to cut to size for the interior of the computer banks. And no one wore shoes anymore because it wasn’t fashionable in the Charted Systems—Yorden couldn’t get a job if he did wear shoes—which meant he was going to end up with some nasty lacerations and a bunch of questions as to how they got there. Art restorers were not, as a general rule, supposed to break everything they touched.

  Yorden pulled an old tablet from his pocket and scrolled through the online options. His thumb slicked over the cellulose weave as his hand shook. Damn it, he was better than this. He could handle a minor setback. There was no reason to get so upset. It wasn’t like there weren’t other ways to get off Earth. This was just the one with the fewest strings.