Jeff Kozzi

Chapter 54:  The Exile

Hudorin spaceport landing bays, Strilok, Intergal 31:5:62196

The alcohol only produced a slight shaking swagger in Haarl Kajer’s stride; he didn’t stumble on his way back to Jokkey. As he did every day upon returning to his interworld-mobile home at the landing bay in Hudorin, the main spaceport on Strilok, he paused and looked over his ship, still, after so many years, with a frown of disappointment. Starkade dwarfed Jokkey, and the smaller ship flew less gracefully, even though it looked far sleeker than Starkade’s double-compartment design. While Jokkey adequately met all Haarl’s living needs, including storage for his few clothes and considerable provisions of bottles, it was no luxury yacht. Again, as he did every day, Haarl swore he would kill, brutally and slowly, whoever had stolen Starkade, just as soon as he found out who that was. And again, as he did every day, he told himself that he’d start trying to identify the thief "tomorrow."

Haarl didn’t notice his pursuers among the flurry of business and motion of the spaceport. He only noticed the six blue-clad Kajerist enforcers that stood by Jokkey’s entry ramp—the ship was so poor it didn’t even have a lift tube, and Haarl, never without constantly-bemoaned conscious reminders of his sixty-two years, had to walk up and down the inclined ramp every day.

Maybe not today; the enforcers had their lasertrons drawn, blocking his ever-swooping path.

Casually, he placed his flattened but wrinkled hands on the joint of his legs and groin. The thin shaft of the Chrid, openly concealed in the cloth sheath slung from his belt, rested between his middle and ring fingers, solid in contact with his palm.

His adrenaline surged, providing the illusion of sobered sensations. He resented that interruption of his bliss as much as anything else. He heard footfalls behind him and turned. Six more enforcers, firearms also drawn, blocked the opening of the hanger parapet.

"Can I help you blokes?"

"Haarl Kajer," the human enforcer from the rear group said.

"Who?" Haarl looked them over more carefully. Actually only five in each squad had their firearms drawn. The sixth in each sextet carried awkward scanning devices with hand-held monitors and an array of sensory equipment on their backs.

The human woman strode forward. The Oktoid that towered above and behind her writhed hir eye stalks and the two tentacle arms that grew from hir shoulder blades while the baseform hands on the end of hir other tentacles held hir firearm fixed on Haarl.

"Haarl Kajer," the human repeated.

"Never heard of him."

The Oktoid hissed. Haarl stepped back away from the pursuing party and its aggressive amphibian. The five armed enforcers of the group that had waited by the ship stepped towards him. Haarl pressed his hand against the Chrid’s cloth sheath.

"Don’t play games, sir. Your son has requested your presence back on Shalhoon."

"I think you have me mistaken for someone else."

One of the two Karseks from the group that had waited at Jokkey activated a holographic display from his sensor harness. Haarl’s likeness appeared. The human man in that group nodded confirmation. "It’s him."

"The sensorrs don’t lie," one Karsek said. "Solid rreading, rright in frront of us."

He wasn’t sure how to interpret the feline baseform’s comment. He almost assumed they were tracking him.

The armed enforcers still moved towards him, with slow, almost casual steps that nevertheless closed the space between them. Six other enforcers, four avians of three different races and two winged reptilian Ottireps landed on the parapet. Haarl incorrectly assumed they were Modrins because their leathery wings, four arms, and orange-hued skin all lent a distantly demonic appearance. He recognized the lone Kobik because the avian landed with her back to Haarl in the typical Kobik reverse-orientation. When using their wings as a baseform would use hir arms, Kobiks extended their wings behind their paunched bodies. Haarl didn’t recognize the race of three other avians.

The new arrivals carried the same formation of armaments as the other groups. Five carried firearms, and one avian wore the electronic backpack. A man sharper than Haarl would have expected the similar outfitting, but Haarl couldn’t positively identify their weapons as lasertrons or some more sinister weapons. The Chrid’s energies tempted him even through the black cloth. He had never understood the scepter. It was far too mystical for non-technological, non-spiritual man of the six hundredth, twenty-second century of interworld contact. He didn’t need to understand it to use it.

He was glad that the free-flying enforcers had landed. They hadn’t so much as dropped a feather in flight; he hadn’t known they were there, just as he hadn’t sensed his pursuers on the ground. Their landing on the wall heightened his awareness of the privacy of the bay that had housed Jokkey for the past two months. No one would even witness what had happened to him. His eyes rolled into the clouds that streamed through the bright sky. He didn’t see any other airborne patrols, only moving vessels and the occasional low-flying alien, none of whom seemed remotely interested in the gathering of enforcers around a lone human.

He took the absence of Blakkarrions as a good sign.

"Your son would like you to return with us willingly, sir," the human woman said.

"He could have asked me in person. ‘Twas his idea I leave."

"Obviously he changed his mind," the woman said. She extended a finger to the group by the Jokkey. "Jin and Guoni are pilots. They’ll take you in your ship if you wish."

Even through her uniform shirt and unfastened jacket, her motion made Haarl notice the desirability of her breasts. But he desired his freedom even more. He willed himself to be defended.

Energy shrieked from the Chrid’s cupped end, bursting through the cloth sheath without harming his thigh. At once, a whirlwind of energy overswept the private landing bay. The enforcers that had thought Haarl would be more civilly approachable after his daily binge didn’t live long enough to express their surprise. Less than eight kroop in front of Haarl, the Chrid’s discharge forked into three swirling paths of energy. The first turned into a wide ray that dissected the ground pursuers two-and-a-half kroop from the ground, well below the human woman’s breasts that Haarl had briefly coveted. The second column of energy twisted into an ever-thickening burst that crashed into the shrieking Ottireps and avians. The wall beneath them cracked, split, and crumbled in a crash of mortar, feathers, and burning globs of thick, leathery flesh with color that suddenly seemed very natural to Haarl.

The group by Jokkey opened fire. Small fireballs burst from the Chrid as if of their own accord, intercepting the Kajerists’ offensives even as the third column of Haarl’s offensive seemed to miss the targets. Crackling the air around them, it burst past the enforcers as they fired second rounds. To Haarl, the Kajerists’ discharges looked no more like lasers than the Chrid’s energies did. He swallowed, fearing he’d be electrocuted, or worse. Smaller globules of crackling energy again erupted from the Chrid as he raised it from the disintegrated sheath. The fireballs intercepted each of the enforcers’ shots as his first blast, as if of an independent will dedicated to Haarl’s most subliminal thoughts, avoided contact with Jokkey and twisted midair. The thick snake of energy split into six smaller offshoots of energized fire and burned through the backs of each of the Kajerists.

As suddenly as the illumination had burst through the hangar, it ceased. Some of the enforcers’ bodies twitched. Haarl avoided looking at the burned and charred remains. He held the Chrid out before him.

The customary shake of his arm returned. He strained his muscles against the sudden need for bodily discharges and wrinkled his nose against the sharp odors of crackling ozone and burned flesh, feather, fur, and flaking scales. He licked his lips. "I’d better get out of here, off Strilok."

He looked at the enforcers who had waited for him at Jokkey, with more than a passing interest in the scanner pack on the Karsek’s back. A small fire had ignited from the electronics; a hole had burned clear through the pack on its way into the Karsek’s back. He kicked the Karsek’s paw to the side and gazed at the handheld monitor. The screen was dark.

Twitching, Haarl gazed around the hangar again. The equipment carried by the lone Dargon among the fliers had crashed against the ground when the bodies fell from the wall. His tongue heavy with the desire for a long, relaxing cocktail, he turned to the last group, poking the Chrid at shadows that could have been reinforcements. The backpack seemed to be in tact, due largely to the Chrid’s low strike against that group. He waddled to them, noticing that the dead human’s body had fallen so that her breasts pointed skyward. The Oktoid’s limbs flailed and twitched madly. Haarl fired another blast into the dead Oktoid, then three more, burning the alien until all its writhing limbs smoked.

Haarl Kajer had never liked aliens much anyway. He didn’t miss the constant contact with aliens that his role as Shalhoon’s former king necessitated. He could tolerate Noshinsis and Qualmloids and other baseform, not-too-"abnormal" species, but he had no use for feather, furred, or scaled people. They made funny noises, shed, flaked, and too frequently smelled, particularly by the breath. He particularly mistrusted flighted aliens; he assumed that anyone who could so easily shit on other peoples’ heads and fly off without being caught would shit on other peoples’ heads and fly off.

He looked again at the stellar-pointing nipples and felt the first iota of regret. Smacking his lips in drunken desire for just a trickle of unijinso on his tongue, he turned to the sensor array and saw no obvious damage. Lights still winked and blinked with healthy-appearing operations. He looked more closely. The harness and pack seemed to be more of an assemblage than a unified piece of equipment. He recognized the holographic projector for what it was, and the communicator, and of course the monitor with its display of the grid map of Hudorin’s streets, with a red blip that showed the equipment’s location within the hangar bay.

He jumped when the Oktoid’s eye stalks quivered under the bioelectric pulse of dying nerves. He turned and released another blast from the Chrid, this intended for the Oktoid’s head. The Chrid’s arcane energies burned through the thick, pliable skin and ruptured the cavity of the Oktoid’s skull.

Out of the corner of his eye, Haarl thought he had seen a spike in the diameter of the red blip. By the time he turned back to the display, it looked exactly like it had before the dead Oktoid had startled him. Shifting electronic displays weren’t typical aftereffects of Haarl’s usual intoxication. The signal had peaked when he had discharged the Chrid. Haarl was too paranoid to think the cause could have been anything but his own actions, but too emotionally hampered for self-confidence in even the lowliest thought that wasn’t routine, particularly when it came to alien electronic devices.

He raised the Chrid above his head with both hands. Heedless of any aliens or ships passing above him, he discharged a fireball from the Chrid without taking his eyes off the monitor. The signal spiked again. He pulsed four more blasts and watched the display alter in perfect reactionary rhythm.

"Dammit all, that’s how they tracked me!"

He took shaky steps back away from the mass of smoking corpses. Another pang of regret overcame him. He had killed eighteen people without much more than a single thought of his own defense. While he felt it better that they die rather than him, he had to admit to himself that they had been civil enough in their attempted abduction, far better than the Blakkarrion agents from the prior year. He had been happy that he had killed them, and the first drink afterwards had been in celebration, not desperate need.

His addled mind correlated the deaths of these eighteen unknown troops to the daughter-in-law and grandchildren he’d lost three weeks before. He’d never known the children, any of them, until the newscasts that had informed him of their deaths. In fact he thought Kethe had had only three children. The years had been too long and hard for him to even remember many details about Samantha.

He turned back to the Jokkey, examining the dead enforcers for his best path through them without soiling his shoes on their charred remains. Then, in a brief stroke of drunken brilliance, he returned to the dead Quoopen whose back bore the only working backpack.

With dim, low bursts, he fired the Chrid to release the harness from the baseform’s back, then heaved the entire set towards the Jokkey. His breaths were short and labored by the time he reached the ramp. He activated the controls, relieved that the Kajerists didn’t seem to have even tried to break his lokkodes. He dragged the backpack up the ramp and doubled himself over it with gasping breaths.

Bottle in hand, he sunk into the padded pilot’s chair and glanced out the plax from the cockpit, relieved to see that no one had yet investigated the crumbled parapet. It didn’t occur to him that the Kajerists had warned off Strilok’s native personnel. Flipping switches, he activated the engines and called for approval for takeoff. The ship vibrated, louder than Starkade ever had.

He thought again of his dead grandchildren and swigged from the bottle. He hadn’t fully expected clearance to depart. Hudorin’s flight control charted his path and connected him to the larger worldly mainframe that controlled all fights over Strilok and through its space. Haarl engaged the autopilot to follow the flightpath and drank a long stream from the bottle.

His eyes fell to the Chrid, glistening in its place on the empty co-pilot’s seat. "They’ll keep finding me through you," he said to it.

The flight controller’s voice requested his destination. "Shalhoon," he said, hoping the Kajerists might believe he had been apprehended. So far, the hanger didn’t seem to be investigated.

"Confirmation STRIL-31596-357A. Safe voyage."

The Jokkey darted from its holding pattern and ascended higher into Strilok’s billowing clouds. The sky grew brighter as the small ship pierced the atmosphere and thrust itself into the colorful brilliance of star-crowded space. Haarl looked down again at the Chrid, took another clumsy swig that left golden brown liquid dribbling from the corner of his mouth, and tapped at the controls before the autopilot could throw the ship into supraspeed.

He cleared Jokkey to exit Strilok’s official spaceways, then set the ship to turn well away from the Sentral Sistem.

He tenderly lifted the Chrid from the chair and held it up to the cockpit plax as the sightshields locked into place. The cockpit’s illumination panels glinted off the shining scepter. "I think I can find a home for you where I’ll be much safer."

He seemed to wait for an answer, or perhaps imagined he heard one, then said, "You’ll like Shorns." He leaned the bottle over the Chrid, dripped some of the fluid into the cupped end and clinked the Chrid’s cupped end against the mouth of the bottle. Steam wisped into the cockpit as the fluid quickly evaporated from the scepter.

"But the boy—Blane—him I can’t say whether or not you’ll like."

After a moment’s silence he smiled and raised the bottle back to his thin lips. "Well, if you say so, I’m sure you’ll get on quite fine...."