Rook Winters - Weight of Ashes

Kane slid his hand into the outer opening of the feeding slit and grabbed a mandible. Its tiny teeth-like ridges tore at his hand as he pulled. Several surrounding mandibles opened partway sympathetically and Kane shoved his gun into the opening. He fired toward the end where the Qyntarak’s internal organs connected to its emotive antennae. The bullet would bounce off the inside of the body armor, magnifying the damage.

Kantarka-Ta spasmed and its tentacles collapsed into limp piles.

His arm still covered in Qyntarak digestive fluids, Kane unfastened the body armor and slid off the covering to expose the thermal-optical organ and antennae fronds.

“You were always such a son of a bitch.”

He pressed the gun against the thermal-optical organ and the Qyntarak twitched, a single tentacle flying into the air and straight through Kane’s stomach. Kane made a gagging noise and felt the world around him start to spin.

He pulled the trigger and dropped the gun. He wrapped both hands around the tentacle and tried to push it out but his hands slipped on the blood that was coating the outside.

My blood.

He closed his eyes, it was too hard to keep them open, and let himself slide to the ground beside his impaler.

The inside of the pod went dark as the door closed. The only challenge to the blackness was the faint light from the heads-up display of the EVA suit. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the outlines of cargo boxes.

The heads-up display announced, “Establishing intravenous connection.”

He felt pressure and then the sting of a needle pricking his arm inside the suit.

The status box in the helmet display showed LAUNCH -0:05.

Court tightened his grip on the little white box. The transponder’s green light flashed momentarily, reminding him that it was on and ready to respond to the Willow Wisp ’s locator signal.

LAUNCH -0:03.

Deep breath, Court.

LAUNCH -0:01.

He didn’t feel anything and then without warning it felt like the weight of the world was pressing down on him. The outlines of the cargo boxes grew blurry and everything went black.

Elle watched the water ripple in her glass in response to Bear’s bouncing leg. Their advocate seemed indifferent to their distress as he read on his tablet.

He looked up when someone knocked on the door. A woman stuck her head in and asked if she could have a minute with his clients.

“Of course.” He left them alone in the room with the woman without asking for their opinion on the matter.

“How are you two holding up?”

“Do we know you?” Bear asked.

“That’s right, you haven’t seen me since my alterations. It’s Ursula.”

Elle leaned forward and studied the woman. Her hair color was different, the nose and cheekbones were wrong, and contact lenses obscured her eyes. Her voice sounded familiar but not right. Elle didn’t believe she would misremember Ursula that much even though it had been weeks since they’d seen her.

“You don’t look like Ursula,” Bear said.

“Reclamation leadership sponsored a physical identity redesign for me. Facial reconstruction and vocal cord alterations to change my voice. I’m like a whole new person. No facial recognition or voice analysis system will trigger on me now.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but you’ll have to excuse me for being skeptical.”

“Then ask me something that only I’ll know.”

“Tell me about when we met,” Elle said.

“You came in with Court. He looked sick.”

“What did you give him?”

“Water, in a chipped glass. And then you let Maud swindle you out of sixty qynars.”

“It really is you.”

“I told you.”

“Do you know how Ainsley and Wilm are?” Bear asked.

“I do. I wish it was all good news. Both have new clean identities with no debt records, same as you. Ainsley has full use of her leg now. Unfortunately, Wilm got himself into some trouble trying to restart Britt’s antiviral smuggling operation. We’re doing what we can but chances are he’ll be spending some time in a forced work program.”

“That kid is more heart than head.”

“So it would seem.”

“What about Court?” Elle asked.

“Still nothing. No word from the Willow Wisp , but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t successful. They might have reasons for keeping quiet.”

“You didn’t come here to see us in person because there was no news,” Bear said. “What’s going on?”

“The reason the leadership had me change my appearance is because I was raided. One of the agents you tangled with, a man named Wilkes, was out for revenge. They took everything, including the original data vault and all the copies I’d made of the data. I’d only gotten a fraction of the information distributed to other parts of the Reclamation. They’re funding some research projects based on the bits we’ve been able to piece together, but it will be a long road. I wanted to let you know so you’d be cautious… We don’t believe the ruling will go in your favor today. We think they’re going to sentence you to an off planet forced work program.”

“A red ship?” Bear said and wrapped his big hands around the back of his neck.

They sat in extended silence until the advocate came back into the room. “The committee is ready for us.”

“Good luck,” Ursula said.

She didn’t follow them into the hearing room where three women and two men sat on a platform several inches higher than the rest of the room. A handful of onlookers were in flimsy chairs at the back. Elle didn’t recognize any of them.

“Eleanor Blake and Quinton Basque, the two of you were caught attempting to remove wards of the state from an officially sanctioned Aldebaran research facility. You misrepresented your identity to Aldebaran staff. You bribed or attempted to bribe numerous employees. You were in possession of stolen Aldebaran property, including uniforms and ID bands. The research facility in question is a high security installation. The seriousness of your actions cannot be overstated. After hearing from the affected parties, calculating restitution, evaluating your lifetime earning potential, and factoring in the specific circumstances, the conclusion of this committee is to assign you to involuntary labor aboard high orbit service ships. Because of the collaborative nature of your actions, you will be assigned to different ships to remove the opportunity for future collusion. The next launch is in nine days. You will remain in custody until that time. Thank you to the committee members for their thoughtful deliberation on this matter. This hearing is concluded and you are dismissed.”

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Rook Wintersis a tea-fueled writer with a weakness for dad jokes. He lives in New Brunswick, Canada with his family and is definitely a dog person. Weight of Ashes is his second novel.

Learn more at rookwinters.com, follow @rookwinters on Twitter, or search for Rook Winters Author on Facebook.

The seed of the idea for this book came from a satirical sci-fi short story I wrote in 2017 about alien bureaucrats expropriating Earth to use as a nursery for the larval development stage of their offspring. Since the larvae are non-sentient omnivores with voracious appetites, the aliens are evicting humans for their own safety. The story is structured as a series of letters and memos over a 200 year period.