Fall and Rising by Sunny Moraine

Author:Sunny Moraine [Moraine, Sunny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2015-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

“You’re certain?”

Sinder nodded. “Quite certain. There’s nowhere else he could have gone. We’ve found tracks that lead away from the crash site.” A lie, but not entirely. There had been no tracks around the crash site itself, but miles distant they had found the tracks of a groundcar, one that had come from the east, stopped, then turned around and headed back again. That in itself wasn’t conclusive, obviously—but he knew what it meant. He simply knew it.

“And you know that you can apprehend him?”

“If he’s there, he’s trapped. They’ve done that much for us. All we need is the clearance to go in and get him.”

The woman on the comm screen frowned, her elegant lips pursed. She was one of the top people he had access to, stationed in the halls of power on Terra. Not as high up as the ancient things in their climate-controlled towers on Terra, living on a diet of hormones and concentrated nutrients, stumbling through the hollow shell of their rule while the real rulers did the work beneath them. In truth, he wouldn’t want to talk to them anyway. There would be no point.

“This is a sensitive matter, Mr. Sinder.” The woman regarded him with narrowed eyes, passing a hand down the perfect angles of her face. “You understand that. This isn’t merely a matter of getting the formalities taken care of. This isn’t just about stamping and turning in the proper paperwork. If you’re allowed to do this, you and your people will have to be granted the highest clearance available. In terms of access to information, you would be the equivalent of both a top executive and a top administrator. I can’t hand that kind of thing out like candy.”

“I understand.” Sinder took a breath, trying to keep his impatience from showing. None of this was anything he didn’t already know. “If you could expedite the process at all, if I can give you anything that would make the whole machinery run a little faster—”

“Send me whatever intelligence you’ve compiled. I’ll need to take this up the chain.”

So the ancient ones would need to be brought into it. The Founders. Old gods, fog-minded and weak-willed, thinking they were strong enough to resist death itself, when in fact they were simply too afraid of it to face it. Sinder felt increasing scorn for their apparent belief that their desperate, hollow half-life was perfection, instead of the effortless, intrinsic thing he imagined perfection must truly be: an existence in which pristine, perfect life was so deeply written into the code that weakness and death would never touch it. To even hint at disrespect for the Founders was one step from blasphemy, though Sinder was almost certain that more than a few people held his opinion. The Founders were the fathers and mothers of everyone. They had set down the foundations on which the Protectorate was built. Their word was law.

Their word was bullshit.

“Whatever you have to do.” Sinder inclined his head; a tiny version of a bow.

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