Title: In Their Shadow
Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)
Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence.
Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?
Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)
AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts.
AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows: Affinity and {Datavises}
AN3: This is basically a summarisation of 'The Reality Dysfunction' - the first part of the Night's Dawn trilogy - dressed up as Joshua telling his story to Xander. If anyone's feeling keen enough to read it, I can't recommend it enough. Questions like, 'Who is Dominique, and why did Joshua react the way he did to Ione's threat/promise to introduce Xander to her?' will be answered. Be warned, though - it's not for the faint-hearted, as it runs to something over 1200 pages. By comparison, 'The Lord of the Rings' tops out at just over 1000.
Xander reluctantly raised his glass to his lips - partly from embarrassment, and partly because this was a completely new drink to him - and took a cautious sip. The Norfolk Tears was smooth in his mouth, but breathed fire into his stomach.
"Jesus," he gasped, and looked at his glass with amazement.
"Good stuff, isn't it?" Joshua asked with a grin.
"You bet it is," Xander replied, and polished off the glass, and Joshua refilled it.
"Okay, our turn to tell a story," Joshua said, indicating Louse and Ione as well as himself.
Xander put his glass back on the table and settled back. "Okay, lay it on me," he said.
"Your wish is my command," Joshua said with a grin, but to Xander's surprise, it was Ione who started off the story.
****
The story started in the early twenty-fifth century, when a scoutship from the Kulu Kingdom entered what was to all intents and purposes, a fairly average star system, only to discover that there was no terracomp planet in the system.
Xander asked, "What's a terracomp planet?"
"A terracomp - or terracompatbile - planet is an Earth-like world," Ione answered.
"Oh, okay."
Despite that fact, the scoutship commander had decided to run a full scan of the system - the people who get picked for the job of scouting new systems tend to be meticulous people, and besides, the cost of the survey wouldn't add a great deal to the already staggering cost of the mission - which had gone smoothly, until they reached the first gas giant, which the crew had named Mirchusko.
At first, it seemed like just another ring, albeit at an unusually high altitude. Then one of the sensor officers had noticed the strange spectroscopy readings. Curiosity fully engaged, the commander had ordered a closer inspection. The results amazed everyone.
The outer ring wasn't made up of the usual rocks, dust and ice. It consisted of rubble - rubble from an extraordinary number of habitats. Speculation that it was some sort of Edenist outpost had been short-lived, as the Edenists only colonised settled systems, to make it easier to sell the Helium-3 that they mined. Apart from anything else, there had been a truly staggering number of habitats - estimates ranged from sixty to seventy thousand habitats, which was about three times the number of Edenist habitats throughout the entire Confederation. Even the Jovian habitats numbered just over three thousand.
The report back to the Kulu Corporation - the massive, multi-disciplinary corporation owned by the reigning Saldana family - had sent shockwaves through the Kulu Kingdom, particularly when the follow-up scientific mission revealed that the habitats making up what was now becoming called the Ruin Ring hadn't been destroyed by natural means or an outside event.
All seventy thousand habitats had committed suicide, and en masse, too.
The then-Crown Price Michael Saldana had entered into negotiations with the Edenists to purchase a habitat seed, which he intended to germinate in orbit above Mirchusko for use as a base of research. Given Kulu's staunch anti-bitek stance - some said it bordered on fanaticism - this was a move that generated a severe backlash among the population of Kulu, particularly when the seed arrived at Mirchusko in the year 2428, and was attached to the asteroid which would serve as its food source for the next six years.
Some astute handling of the situation could have smoothed the situation out - after all, a habitat was perfect for the long-term analysis that would probably be required, but Michael then proceeded to have affinity symbionts implanted, on the grounds that they would enable him to communicate with the maturing habitat.
This too was endured, but Michael crossed the line when he had the affinity gene sequenced into his son Maurice, who was then an embryo in an exowomb. The storm of controversy and public indignation swept all before it throughout the Kulu system. Michael's actions were deemed to be unconsciable, given that one of the King of Kulu's titles was 'Defender of the Faith', and the continued denouncing of affinity - all bitek, in fact - by all religions.
Michael abdicated all claims to the Phoenix Throne in favour of his brother Lukas, and was exiled to the young habitat Tranquillity. In order to survive, and to maintain the research into the Ruin Ring, he was forced to write a tax-haven constitution, in order to attract the rich, so that he could live off their surplus.
It was a spectacular success. With the habitat personality overseeing the day-to-day affairs of the habitat, and the personality-controlled serjeants enforcing the laws, Tranquillity quickly became to be regarded as the place to go if you made it. When Michael Saldana - now glorying in the ironic title of Lord of Ruin - opened Tranquillity to blackhawk mating flights, he raised a few Edenist eyebrows, but made himself even more popular among the inhabitants, who had occasional uses for the mercenary starships, along with the combat-boosted mercenaries who started showing up as well.
When Michael Saldana died, he didn't transfer into the habitat's neural structure - causing some fairly hefty sums of money to change hands as the results of various bets - and he left his son Maurice with a thriving economy, the most important trading port in the sector... and a persistent enigma in the form of the Laymil and the Ruin Ring.
In fact, virtually the only things that had been discovered about the previous inhabitants of the system was their name and some basic facts about their biochemistry. Not that Tranquillity organised the collection of artefacts - that was left up to 'scavengers', people who took odd-ball, unique and sometimes jury-rigged spacecraft into the Ruin Ring's orbit, then went extra-vehicular to sift the Ruin Ring by hand in search of useful artefacts they could then sell for a good price.
People like Joshua, in fact.
****
By the time Ione had finished the first part of the story, Xander was enraptured by the description of Tranquillity's parklands, restaraunts and clubs. "Man," he said softly, "I wish I'd had the chance to stay a bit longer."
A brief look of remorse crossed Ione's face. "If you get the chance, come back for a visit," she told him, reaching across the table to pat his hand.
"Would I get a better reception than the last time I dropped in?" Xander asked with an impish grin.
"Sure," Ione replied. "So long as you come through the spaceport like normal people."
"Nitpick, nitpick."
"I might even introduce you to a friend of mine," Ione said slyly. "I think you'd like her."
As Ione said that, Joshua was taking a sip of Tears, and that pronouncement caused him to splutter and nearly choke. "Oh, no," he said. "You can't be thinking about introducing him to Dominique... bloody hell, you are, aren't you?"
"And what if I am?" Ione asked with a dangerous gleam in her eye.
"She'll eat him alive," Joshua muttered. "The exhaustion would probably kill him," he added, remembering his own experiences with the blonde bombshell. "Although he'd probably die smiling."
Xander was wearing a confused expression, while the women were trying to stifle laughter. "Do I want to know?" he asked, looking from face to face.
"I'll tell you when the time comes. But to pick up where Ione left off, yes I was one of the Ruin Ring scavengers, and I was lucky in that I had a proper spacecraft to use - the spaceplane from my starship, the Lady Macbeth..."
****Joshua had been just another scavenger, although luckier than most, with an enviable lifestyle. He'd go out into the Ruin Ring once a week, and party himself senseless in-between. He didn't go into much detail, but Xander had gotten the idea that there were a number of willing women, including... Ione? A glance at her confirmed that.
It made for a comfortable living, but Joshua wasn't interested in that. What he had in mind required a lot of money - five million fuseodollars, to be exact, as his intention was to restore the damaged Lady Mac to flightworthy status.
Then Joshua had made his Big Strike. Delving deeper into the Ruin Ring than he ever had before, he'd stumbled on an incredible discovery - a completely intact Laymil electronics stack, perfectly preserved in ice for the two and a half thousand years since the destruction of the Laymil habitats.
There had been a problem, though - in the form of two other scavengers who'd wanted to take whatever it was that Joshua had found for themselves. "Those bastards tried to kill me," he snarled. "But I managed to see them off."
Although injured, he'd managed to return to Tranquillity, where'd he put the electronics stack up for sale. He'd been fairly confident that it would raise the funds he needed for a refit of the Lady Mac, but when Tranquillity had invoked its right of final bid - at nearly seven and a half million fuseodollars - it gave Joshua enough money to replace the Lady Mac's damaged components with brand new kit. A life of the owner-captain an independent trading starship beckoned. Hiring a crew - Ashly Hanson, spaceplane pilot; Sarha Mitcham, systems specialist; Warlow, a cosmonik who was the maintenance officer; Melvyn Ducharme, fusion specialist and Dahybi Yadev, node specialist - he'd set out to make a fortune.
Unfortunately, reality had bitten hard. In the first six months, Joshua barely made enough to cover costs - and he wasn't even considering mercenary actions, although he could have; the Lady Mac was an armed starship, with eight maser cannon, combat wasp launch cradles and an antimatter drive - and his one attempt at a slightly-less-than-legal flight had ended when he was intercepted by Confederation Navy voidhawks, although the incriminating cargo had been dumped.
Undaunted, he'd simply set his sights higher. Norfolk was approaching conjunction - the point where the planet was between the two stars of the Norfolk system - and a cargo of Norfolk Tears would rake in several not-so-small fortunes, depending on how much he got.
The main problem had been that, as a first-time captain, he'd need a way to break into the market. After some research, he'd decided to carry a load of wood to Norfolk.
Xander had started laughing - once the basic concepts behind interstellar trade were explained to him - and asked, "What the hell possessed you to do that?" Noticing the way the others twitched at the word 'possessed', he raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
"The possessed caused one of the worst crises in human history, Xander," Ione explained. "And that includes anything you faced. But all in good time."
"The technology level," Joshua said, answering Xander's question. "As I'm sure Ione has explained to you, there isn't a great deal of technology used here. In fact, wood is still used here for a lot of things. So I looked for the toughest wood in known space and found it on a newly settled stage one colony world called Lalonde."
When he arrived at Durringham - the capital of Lalonde and site of the only spaceport on the planet - he found himself in the middle of brewing trouble. According to rumour, the Ivets - Involuntary Transportees, convicts sent to colony worlds in the same way convicts were transported to America, Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - had started some sort of insurrection, and were advancing towards Durringham.
This had caused Joshua some trouble, but he had managed to locate a thousand tons of mayope wood - which was as hard as advertised - and left Lalonde for Norfolk, along with one passenger.
A young man by the name of Quinn Dexter.
The flight from Lalonde to Norfolk had been plagued by mysterious problems, extending the time in transit from four days to over a week. Frankly, Joshua had been glad to be rid of Dexter on arrival.
The mayope had worked its wonders, but that hadn't been the only miracle that Joshua had achieved.
During the negotiation process, Joshua had noticed that the agent's assistant - a young man by the name of Gideon Kavanagh, who had suffered the misfortune of having one arm amputated after an accident - was being strangely quiet. Acting on instinct, he'd offered Gideon a job on the Lady Mac, which he'd accepted.
The net result of that had been that Joshua's cargo was one thousand tons of the most expensive drink in known space, where most captains didn't get half of that, along with an invitation to his family's estate for Midsummer celebrations - Cricklade estate.
"And that's when I first met Louise," Joshua said warmly, turning a loving gaze at his wife, who returned it.
"And me!" Genevieve piped in.
"And you too, Gen," Joshua said with a chuckle.
It had been a grand time for them, with moonlit romance, a passionate affair, and a promise to return.
"He returned bearing gifts," Ione said with a smile. A gigantea - a tree that would eventually grow to over two hundred meters tall - seed from Lalonde, and a sailu - an impossibly cute miniature xenoc animal resembling a panda. "Actually the sailu was brought back before he left for Lalonde, but that's a minor detail," Ione added, still grinning. Joshua shot her an indignant look, which she ignored.
Joshua had devised a plan to use the mayope from Lalonde to make some serious money, but those plans had been put on hold when outside events intervened.
A colonist-carrier starship had arrived from Lalonde. It seemed that the Ivet troubles on Lalonde had spiralled beyond the planet's governor to control, plus there were rumours that Laton had resurfaced on Lalonde, and he was seeking to hire a mercenary army to restore control. In the end, six blackhawks, nine Adamist independent traders and five thousand ground troops, including scout teams of combat boosted, had accepted contracts and set off, with the Lady Mac being one of them.
Joshua intended to protect his interests on Lalonde.
Along with a mercenary scout team lead by one Reza Malin, Joshua had carried a reporter by the name of Kelly Tirrel, who'd... enticed... Joshua to allow her passage.
When they arrived, and the scout teams had been landed, things had gone pear-shaped in a hurry.
Some of the spaceplanes had been hijacked after landing their scout teams, which in turn lead to some of the starships themselves being hijacked. Things only got worse when a Confederation Navy squadron arrived, with an arrest order for the Lady Mac.
"That surprised the hell out of us," Joshua said. "But we had more important things to worry about."
Such as the fact that two blackhawks had now been hijacked, and a brisk battle had broken out, with combat wasp salvoes flying on all sides. One of the Navy ships had been destroyed, then a voidhawk, then two more frigates had been destroyed when one of the mercenary ships had activated its patterning nodes while still in a gravity well, resulting in an explosion that rivalled that of an antimatter combat wasp.
That was of minor importance to Joshua, though, as a salvo of combat wasps had locked on to the Lady Mac. Unable to break for a higher orbit to jump away, he'd opted for the only other available direction.
Down.
At an acceleration of nine gravities, he'd taken the Lady Mac on a trajectory that grazed the upper edges of Lalonde's atmosphere. The combat wasps, blindly chasing their target, had burned up in the atmosphere. Once on the other side of the planet, Joshua had jumped to Murora, intending to make hasty repairs before returning to Lalonde to pick up Kelly and the mercs.
However, he arrived just in time to see two of the hijacked starships shooting up the young habitat Aethra, having already destroyed the supervisory stations. After carrying out a hair-raising rescue of the surviving Edenists, he'd come to a depressing realisation.
He was trapped.
The two hijacked starships occupied higher orbits, so running straight up for a jump point was out of the question. Although the Lady Mac could accelerate at eleven gravities, easily outpacing the two hijacked starships who seemed to be suffering unusual malfunctions in their drive systems, there were now young children on board, whose bodies would not be able to withstand prolonged periods of high gravity.
Once again, the only available direction had been down.
Joshua took up position in the rings of Murora, where he could hide for months if need be. Except that he'd promised to return for Kelly and the mercs. His intention had been to lurk in the rings until the two starships gave up and left, as in his last message to Kelly, he'd told her to hide out, and he'd expected her to be able to do so for a few days at least.
Then Kelly sent him a message, relayed through Aethra, and the whole situation changed, for they now knew who they were up against, and it wasn't as simple as Ivet rebellion, Laton, or a foreign invasion.
The souls of the dead, returning to possess the living. The possessed.
Xander's response to that was, "Huh?"
"While people are alive," Ione explained, "they generate this... energy, which has a pattern imprinted on it by human sentience. That's what a soul is... and don't look at me like that, Xander. Even the best scientists in the Confederation can't find a better explanation than that, so don't expect one from me."
Joshua picked up the explanation from there. "And when a person dies, the energy mostly dissipates, but some of it goes to another dimension, called the 'beyond'. The whole thing was kicked off by Quinn Dexter on Lalonde. It turns out that before he was transported to Lalonde, he was a member of a Light Bringer coven on Earth. It was one of their sacrifice ceremonies that opened the way to the beyond. But there was some unwitting help."
That 'help' had turned out to be a Ly-cilph, a member of a transcendent species who saw the reason behind existence to seek knowledge. As it had done in this case. However, it had gotten too close, and in attempting to probe the beyond, it provided a conduit for souls returning from the beyond.
The way someone was possessed was simple - and brutal. Unbearable pain was inflicted on the intended victim, until they broke and agreed to possession.
In fact, before the arrival of the mercenary squadron, both the Kulu External Security Agency and the Confederation Navy launched missions into the jungles of Lalonde, intending to find out what was happening. Both missions succeeded... sort of, and with a high price.
But the fact of the matter was that Joshua had to return to Lalonde as soon as possible, if not sooner, especially since Kelly and the mercs had rescued thirty children who needed picking up immediately. After some incredulity, it was decided to return.
That just left the problem of avoiding the two starships that were still searching for them long enough to get to a jump point. With the young children now in zero-tau, the Lady Mac could now pull her maximum acceleration, but the minimum safe distance from a gas giant for a ZTT - Zero Temporal Transit, the Faster Than Light drive used by Adamist starships - was one hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometres.
A distance they had no chance of reaching.
There was another alternative. Close by was one of Murora's moons... and its Lagrange point.
A point where the conflicting gravity wells of both gas giant and moon cancel out, it was actually an area about two kilometres across, and it was theoretically possible to complete a successful ZTT jump from one, but it had never been tried before - who'd be suicidal enough to?
Joshua was... well, desperate enough, anyway.
With the problem of a jump point out of the way, all attention was now focused on finding a way to avoid the searching starships. Joshua pointed out that if they timed it right, the Lady Mac could make a break for it at a time when one of the starships was at the far end of the search zone and too far away for its combat wasps to reach the Lady Mac in time. Which just left the other starship in a position to interfere.
Joshua proposed that someone go EV, taking a nuclear warhead from on of their combat wasps and place it on the starship's projected orbital track where it would be detonated when the time was ripe to cause the maximum damage and confusion. Warlow immediately volunteered for the job, citing his superior experience and overriding all other attempts.
Well, that was the plan, anyway.
Warlow threw a few spanners into the works when he unilaterally decided to manually move the nuke into the best position... and to detonate it manually.
Joshua and Ashly had protested, but they were unable to budge the cosmonik from his decision.
He detonated the nuke, sacrificing himself to give Joshua the best possible chance for escape.
Joshua had made the best of that chance, and reached the Lagrange point successfully, where he made a short jump of one billion kilometres, then jumped to the other side of the system, then returned to Lalonde - total elapsed time, eighty minutes.
Even then, he'd been just in time to rescue Kelly and the children, with the mercs sacrificing themselves in the face of an attacking horde of possessed to give them more time to escape.
The return trip to Tranquillity had been a solemn affair - except for the rescued children - as they contemplated the sacrifices made to achieve even this level of success.