Story by Aycinth

Characters by Aycinth, Copczin, Kyle273, Averichollie

Written by Averichollie

Sound design by Copczin

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

~T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

This place sucks.

~Captain J. Ryan, 466 regiment 12th PDF, 40768

This story starts with a pool.

The thunder rumbled overhead, but the air was hot and humid, and there would be no rain tonight. Water lapped up against the rock, the pool was kept fed by means of labour, of pumps and miles upon miles of pipes. The fish drank it greedily and unthinkingly; men had died to bring it there.

A man sat alongside the pool, catching the fish gently and looking them over. His feet were bare, and his skin was pale. His shorts were tan, but for those who knew where to look they had a small bird stitched in green along the cuff.

He was wearing a button-down olive shirt, but he had not buttoned the top three buttons. There was a bit of rough twine around his neck, and a heavy silvery ring hung from the twine, set with a bit of carved crysophrase.

He was thin, the sort of thin that only comes with illness, and his face was narrow and angular.

The cherry trees shuffled overhead in the uncertain wind, carrying with it the smell of electricity and rain, but it was a dry wind.

The plants suffered. The water level drooped, replenished by straining pumps. Somewhere, a cicada was chirping.

The fish were silvery green, white, black. They had scales like dragonfish, they had long delicate fins like butterflies, and the man caught them gently, picked the parasites from their scales, fed them, and let them go.

"How long have you been there?" he asked, not looking up.

"Just a few moments," the woman told him. She was short, thin, with a face like a cat's and hair cut in a sharp, angular bob. "Sir…"

"What?"

"It's time."

He released his latest fish, a mint green creature with white streaks curling along its gills. "Shall I at least set the pond in order?" he asked. "Raymond knows nothing about koi."

She twisted her hands together. "Hurry up, please, it's time."

He checked his wrist-mounted chrono. "So it is. Let me dry my feet, eh?"

He'd never liked Scintilla Prime. The space station hovered in geosynchronous orbit over the Scintillan city of Tarsus, and was shaped like a cross between a cathedral and a sea-star, all limbs and docking stations ready to receive merchant ships. It was, the man thought with irritation, needlessly ornate.

Here, it wasn't though. Here, it smelt of sweat and heat and human, and the PA system was harsh-sounding as it delivered docking information, departure and delivery times, and the like. Merchants and workers scurried along nearby like so many lava-ants* across the scuffed metal floors. Four people had so far tried to pickpocket him.

He'd once looked at the numbers, the amount of traffic in and out of the station. Scintilla was the capital world of Calixis**, home to billions of souls, and even more people.

Seventy thousand tonnes of iron passed through this station per day. Something in the neighbourhood of two hundred billion cases of ammunition were shipped out through the rest of Calixis from here. Twelve thousand jars of marmalade entered Scintilla per day. He liked marmalade.

"My name is DeMoss," he grinned at the lady behind the information desk. "I'm here to board the Salieri's Shadow."

She chewed on her tongue, looking down the line of names on her dataslate. "Salieri's Shadow?"

"Yes."

"May I have some proof of identity?"

He fished his wallet out of his pocket and passed it to her.

"Mm," she grunted, not looking at it. "Bay twelve, that way," she pointed. "You're late."

"Late?" he asked, smiling winningly, "or early?"

"Sign here," she passed him a datapad.

*Like fire ants, only stickier

**A sector of imperial space