Chaos Quarter by Welch David

Author:Welch, David [Welch, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Rex was dimly aware of somebody entering the common room. He chewed on one of the five thousand pieces of beef jerky Lucius had picked up on Helvetia. The toughness of the dried meat offered him a primitive sense of accomplishment. Your dried animal flesh is no match for my human pre-molars, he thought, then wondered where the hell a thought like that came from. And why did it feel so satisfying?

“Rex,” he heard Chakrika’s voice say. “What is that?”

She referred to the holographic projection floating above the table. The image of a planet, four feet in diameter, hovered in the air. Small structures, the detail invisible unless you squinted, seemed to swarm around it.

“Earth,” he replied.

Chakrika moved to the couch, sitting in the seat beside him. There was a reverence in her eyes as she stared at the projection.

“That’s Earth?” she asked, awestruck. “That’s the homeworld?”

“That’s it,” Rex replied. “Doesn’t look much different from the rest of them, does it?”

“All other worlds are made in its image,” Chakrika said in a reverent whisper.

“Most of them,” Rex said, motioning to his left. Second stood at the rear of the room, next to the kitchen. Her eyes watched with their usual blank stare. God knew what Hegemon worlds looked like.

“Can I see it? Does your computer have images of it?” Chakrika asked.

“Sure. Updated the maps before I left,” he replied.

A confused look met his words. He smiled patiently.

“Zoom in on my old house,” he spoke.

The computer soared down to the surface, passing space stations and defensive satellites. It broke into the blue of Earth’s sky, through fluffy and not-so-fluffy clouds, down to a suburb of Annapolis, Maryland.

“Used to live here,” he said. “When I was an instructor for the fleet.”

A three-story home, done up in cedar-plank siding, sat on an acre of lawn. Woodland ran from the back of the property, thickening to hardwood forest. A swimming pool and Jacuzzi dominated the back yard. Rex frowned. Whoever had bought the property after his transfer to Pershing Station had taken down his hammock.

“Your home is huge,” Chakrika replied. ”It’s almost a mansion!”

“Fairly standard where I come from,” Rex replied. “Dreamt about it the other day. Shift to Paphlygon, Mecong Isle.”

Earth dissolved, getting a cry of protest from Chaki. Paphlygon took its place. He paused the projection for a moment, letting Chakrika see his homeworld.

From space Paphlygonia looked overwhelmingly blue, with only broken lines of green drawn across it. Three archipelagos dominated his world, each over two thousand miles long. Two began at the same point near the North Pole and then stretched in different directions toward the equator. Another in the southern hemisphere tried to wrap the planet’s circumference just inside the sub-tropical zone, but died off far short of its goal.

Not one island on the planet was bigger than one hundred miles by eighty, but there were so damn many of them that they still made up 13 percent of the world’s surface. Tens of thousands of smaller islands, similar in size to Earth’s Hawaiian chain, clustered around the larger islands.

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