The Black Garden: Chapter 9

New Warder was a long way from Jump Base Tiamat.

My first leg was to get back on the Fetch Quest: one of CEIDR's two branchships and among the newest, built specifically for stealth in Abyss-contaminated environs. It didn’t resemble any other craft in space. Branchships didn’t dock in the traditional sense. Instead, they extruded from the Void, separated from reality by a numonic membrane so dense they resembled enormous neurons. The writhing, star-shaped mass lacked external sensors or any visible hint of the machine hidden within.

From the terminal, I watched as the ship blurred into view, its form glitching into the bay as if it had always been there. It’s tentacle-like process extruded toward the docking collar, connecting with a resounding clunk. My ATLAS chimed in tandem:

‘All personnel for transit to Arnab System, please proceed to Airlock J-14 for boarding.’

“Wehh… about time.” I yawned loudly as I headed into the boarding tunnel, and myself absently wondering about the Navigator aboard the ship. Now I thought about it, I’d never seen the Fetch Quest’s bridge. But the thought passed as quickly as it came—I was too tired for that shit. Still, the impulse lingered while I made a beeline for the nearest transit lounge.

The interior of the branchship was elegant and functional, the walls decorated in translucent virtual murals created by the Fetch Quest’s crew. The paintings provided much needed color. Branchships did not – and could not – have windows or exterior cameras. Beyond the sleek white and gold titanium walls lay the expanse of the Void, the domain of the angel Leviathan. The Void was not the same thing as the Abyss; it—and Leviathan—were basically the Angelic Noosphere, a sentient internet we called the Umbral Choir. Concentrating, I could sense the trembling pressure of it humming against the hull. Their song was hauntingly beautiful, but it was unwise to listen for too long.

We slipped between slices of reality like an octopus entering dark waters as Leviathan folded the branchship through itself and tunneled us from one point in the universe to another. We traveled a hundred trillion miles in less than forty minutes, all but one split second of that time being preparation for leaving, or prep for docking at the Arnab Relay Fleet Station. There, I was escorted onto an unlisted charter spaceship from the Arnab RFS to Ideni. I slept through the entire fourteen-hour journey, waking once we docked at the Punawahu Aerospace Port. Then I was onto a public airliner under my mission alias. The plane was a newer model and made for civilians, pure luxury from boarding until landing. I graciously accepted breakfast and a mimosa from a handsome flight attendant, and settled in to pick over the details of my mission brief. And specifically, the details of Vornn Industries and its current CEO.

Vornn Industries

Founded by Bastiaan Vornn, Vornn Industries is a self-declared industrial corporation located in New Warder, Kudonia. The company has a special environmental dispensation to extract limited amounts of nickel, platinum and ruthenium from mines located on the nearby Rezende Island Mine. Vornn Industries employs most people in New Warder via its central company and its subsidiaries, and also operates tourist facilities, a local aero-spaceport, schools, and philanthropic environmental projects.

The concession to mine platinum and ruthenium was the peace offering from the other free cities of Kudonia ot New Warder, kind of like offering a lollipop to a bratty kid to shut them up. Both of the rare metals were vital in the construction of spacecraft. All metals were generally mined by planetcrackers, ships designed to take in entire asteroids and meteorites and break them down. New Warder would produce a fraction of those metals per year compared to a single planetcracker run, but the ruthenium in particular was rare enough that the hand-mined stuff was tradable.

Did Sh’chani find evidence of illegal activity, maybe? There’s no way Vornn only trades his ruthenium and platinum for groceries. Any of the neutral or hostile species on the edges of Confluence space were the most likely candidates. The Nu-suht, of course, but also the numerous species they had brutally colonized over millennia. Pirates and freelighters were other possible customers.

I steepled my fingers against the side of my face while I thought about it, summoning Rion Vornn’s profile to review it. A small three-dimensional model of an exceptionally handsome man in his early 40s appeared in front of me. Rion Vornn had shoulder-length dark hair and a trim goatee, intense dark eyes, and a strong, sparse face. He was one of those men who got better as he got older, and he was physically imposing: six foot three and two hundred and twenty pounds, none of it fat.

Rion Vornn

A third-generation Ideni human, Vornn's Dutch grandparents were evacuated from Earth Instance 334-91-B-Vx circa 1941 (local time) by Abyssal Response Fleet Contact teams when the Fleet arrived to assess the extent, causes and possible solutions to the apocalyptic event known locally as 'The Rage’, an Abyssal plague that infected humans and caused them to commit compulsive atrocities to the point of extinction.

Bastiaan Vornn was the CEO of a logistics rail company based in the Netherlands, and operated trains across Europe and in Indonesia. A former colonial resident of Indonesia, he and his wife, Francine - along with their young sons Bas and Stef, were forced to leave due to the Japanese occupation during WW2 and subsequent declaration of independence by the Indonesian peoples. The family was evacuated from a ship containing several hundred refugees in the North Sea by Moemo La’amur (Song of Paradise) Contact Team 2-R.

Damn, that was kind of surreal. My Earth had also been wiped by the Rage, and Contact had also rescued me and a handful of other traumatized survivors off a refugee ship, the Songwa Iridium. The demon who had instigated the Rage had moved from dimensional instance to dimensional instance, seeding one of the most effective Abyssal vectors known to humankind. My parents, my brother, every patient I had ever treated... all of them, collectively nullified along with 30 billion other souls, save for the handful of humans and animals evacuated by the Fleet.

The Vornn family were initially settled in Kudonia in 89901, where they were given the option to contribute to the founding of what would become Punawahu. However, they and 78% of the rescued humans from their Instance elected to establish their independence from the Confluence, with Vornn as their leader. They established their own colony 885 km SW of Punawahu, which the Vornns named New Warder in honor of their Dutch heritage.

The eggs benedict I’d just eaten now sat like a brick in my stomach. I closed the ATLAS and set the walls and ceiling around my pod to transparent, leaning back with a thin, terse sigh. The sky and its sea of clouds opened around me, flooding my seat with light, and the twinge of instinctive fear and the resulting awe chased away the bad memories. The seat next to me was empty, so I set the floor to transparent too—and enjoyed the moment of giddiness as the bottom of the plane appeared to open up underneath me. It kept my mind off other, darker things. But even so, my skin flinched as a thump and whirring sound from underneath my feet broke the tranquil silence of the cabin. The landing gear, as the plane tipped a wing to soar gracefully toward the peninsula just now coming into view.

Beyond the walls of the sleek Zephyr-200, a richly forested peninsula and lush tropical islands came into view. A bittersweet pang flushed through me. There were echoes of South Korea in the shape of New Warder’s territory, in the way the shrouded lilac mountains in the north gave way to flatter, heavily forested lands in the south. The settlement itself was on the southern tip of the peninsula, built out into the sea and the nearby islands. As we descended, the gritty sprawl—so different from the brilliant white and glass skylines of Punawahu and other Confluence settlements—came into focus. We lined up with the distant lights of the runway, and the Zephyr's blade-like wings adjusted shape, morphing to become broader and shorter. I kept the whole two-seat row transparent so I could watch the world swoop up to meet us. A long time ago, I’d hated flying. Now... I still wasn’t sure I liked it, but at least I felt excitement instead of fear as the plane lurched toward the ground.

Ten minutes later, I walked out into a wall of hot tropical air: a warm, wet slap to the face after days of sterile spacecraft and plane cabins. The sweetly scented wind pulled over my skin like damp fingers as I strode out, suit jacket hanging over one arm, a pull-along case in the other hand. My brief had specified I was to mostly wear Terran-style business clothing while in New Warder—tropical-weight suits and shirts, all woven through with carbon fiber armor to render them mostly bullet and claw-proof. I’d gone with a pale fawn blazer over a black shirt and slacks, and sunglasses I hung on my shirt pocket as I moved with the crowd down the ramp. Domestic travel between city-states on any Confluence planet was usually a simple process, but New Warder had an actual customs checkpoint straight out of the 1940s, with an actual human woman behind the counter.

“Hello, Doctor An, and welcome to New Warder!” The woman had curled and bobbed hair and was dressed like a border guard in a dark green skirt-suit and stockings. Her lipstick was crimson, her smile bright and white. She looked like a pin-up model from a Second World War magazine. Or Cold War, I thought with amusement. The airport interior was definitely human architecture—blocky and functional and only vaguely aesthetic, even with the use of Palae’an metamaterials.

I forced a little laugh, a good enough actor to put some warmth into it. "It’s Doctor Soo, actually. An is my first name.”

“Oh! My apologies, Doctor Soo.” The woman’s cheeks flushed. She had an accent close to Dutch, but not quite. “Well, we’re very glad to have you, in any case. We are in desperate need of good doctors. Give me a moment...”

The officer—Peggy Geerhart, by her name badge—cleared her throat and haltingly swiped at her heads-up display with her hands. I figured she was a recently settled refugee.

“So, what’s your story, Peggy?” I asked, leaning a hip against the counter.

“Me? Not much to tell, really.” She didn’t seem to be brushing me off so much as desperately concentrating. “Purpose of stay?”

“Business.” I watched her fumble through the unseen holographic screens with a bemused smile. “My work clearance should be in there.”

“Oh! Yes, there it is.” The woman flushed and bit her lip. “Sorry, this is my first week after my, umm, resettlement program.”

“No worries. Take your time.” I smiled kindly. “Say, what year was it when you were evacuated off Earth?”

“It was 1953 when I was taken away,” she replied, looking up at me with big brown eyes. “The Nazis, you know. They were summoning some truly awful Hellish things. Demons, then aliens… my goodness, it’s been a terrible year. Well, I think it’s been a year. It’s hard to say, you know?”

“I sure do.” I made a sympathetic sound.

“Hmm! Your profile here has some kind of tag...” Peggy trailed off, looking puzzled. “How strange. The, umm, ‘tooltip’? It isn’t telling me what this symbol means.”

“Ohh? Can you show me?” Intuition prickled at the back of my neck in a way that had nothing to do with the travelers huffing impatiently behind me. “I might be able to recognize it.”

“Sure! Here you are.” After a couple seconds of searching, Peggy got her screen to display to me and showed me the small orange detain-and-arrest mark next to my name.