Before dusk, Zero landed on Malida alone to investigate what had happened to Tro. Zero found his subordinate lying half-dead in the middle of a field, covered in pools of gold, Tro’s accompanying soldiers nowhere to be found.
What the hell happened here? he thought to himself.
Standing by Tro, even dwarfed by the man’s size, Zero felt a wave of disgust wash over him.
Tro turned his head towards Zero with a big smile.
“Oh, hey, boss,” Tro greeted. “Nice weather tonight.”
“Explain yourself.”
Tro lifted his head, looking at his missing limbs, broken body, and golden puddles as if he had never seen them before.
“I dunno, boss.” Tro attempted to shrug, but most of the muscles in his left shoulder were destroyed. “It just rained pretty hard today. Honest. I couldn’t defend myself against it.”
“It rained gold?”
“Eyup.”
“Who did this to you?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that. I’d betray their trust.”
In a lightning-fast movement, Zero grabbed the collar of Tro’s uniform, or what was left of it, and heaved some of the man’s ginormous torso to Zero’s face.
“You are a disgrace,” Zero spat at Tro, who was totally unfazed. “You are a lying, cheating disgrace. If it wasn’t for the weakness in Viisi’s heart, you would have been dead last all along. You are nothing more than a burden, an ancient relic from a bygone era that should have rotted and died long ago, an artifact I only held onto because of your long dedication to this faction. From the beginning, you were nothing but a tool.”
“Uh huh,” Tro said, nodding, his face in a look of mock concern. “Well, that would have stung a lot more if I gave a single… flying… shit. You know what you are, Zero? You’re a pretender. I knew Teo Nora himself, boy, and I can tell that you—and everyone in this Nora-damned Domain—are just little children playing a game of make-believe, living a pipe dream fantasy of upholding the glory of an organization that died out a hundred years ago.”
Zero’s face was so red it might have glowed.
“But you’re right,” Tro continued. “I am a disgrace. But only because it took me so long to realize how much of a pathetic bitch you actually are.”
Tro’s body began to freeze solid, starting from his collar and spreading down his torso and up his neck.
“Yep.” Tro nodded. “Go ahead and kill me. Kill a man who’s already half-dead, you coward, because guess what? It’s too late. They are gonna take your little game of pretend down.”
With the last of his energy, Tro regenerated his arm and grew several new ones. Each arm was tipped with a hand which, all at once, displayed a middle finger in Zero’s face.
“Bitch,” Tro said, and then he was frozen.
Zero took a second to look at Tro’s frozen body, taking deep, seething breaths. Ten frozen hands flipped him off at once.
With a yell, Zero stomped his boot into Tro’s frozen face, shattering it. He stomped all over Tro’s body, crumbling it to pieces until he felt he was satisfied.
The Lucre Main’s warp drive was cut short at a seemingly invisible boundary.
“That’s odd,” Flint said. “We’re supposed to have kept going until we reached Nopetu.”
Aurein looked out the window. “Wait. I know what this is. We’ve reached the checkpoint.”
“What?!” Allef and Flint exclaimed in unison.
“The checkpoint?” Allef clarified. “Where they do the eye scan and stuff? Where? It’s empty space around us for half a light-year!”
“Yes. This is the checkpoint. But it isn’t a place we go to for a security check—they come to us.”
Keila’s capital, Nopetu, utilizes strict security protocol to ensure the safety of Keila’s VIPs, weapons, and secrets. In a 0.5 light-year radius around Nopetu’s star system, Keila set up a field of anti-dionic energy that automatically stops any spacecraft mid-warp at this invisible wall in space. When this wall is breached by any object larger than two meters in diameter, it sends a signal to Keila’s headquarters to send out a small team of ships to intercept (ships which, of course, can warp to the wall instantly without interference by the anti-dionic energy field). The small team of Keila ships sent to intercept the incoming object or ship act as Keila’s traveling checkpoint, bypassing the need to build countless checkpoint space stations in a wide area around the capital.
This small team of checkpoint ships appeared outside of the Lucre Main’s window, exiting warpspeed with bright blue flashes of light. Illuminated by the flash of their warp drives, Flint could make out that there were three in total, one larger, bulky ship flanked by two smaller fighter ships, though even the smaller ships were each at least twice as large as the Lucre Main. A hail came on the Lucre Main’s comms.
“Lucre Main, this is Keila checkpoint ship 33-015, accompanied by fighter planes 29-622 and 29-624. Please state the names and intentions of your crew.”
“I got this,” Flint said, and he picked up the microphone in the Lucre Main’s cockpit.
“Checkpoint 33-015, this is the Lucre Main,” Flint began. “On board today we have Rechnoi Erzel, Olph Ontar, and Lazi Kobulia. We’re making transit to Nopetu.”
There was a silence from the Keila responder, in which Flint watched the looming checkpoint ship warily. At this distance from any stars, everything was dark, and details and exact sizes of the Keila ships could not be made out, but Flint couldn’t ignore the sheer number of stars the massive checkpoint ship blocked from view.
“Copy that, Lucre Main. Prepare for handshake.”
Lights turned on on the front of the checkpoint ship, illuminating a hexagonal tunnel that was slowly extending towards the Lucre Main’s airlock. With a reverberating thunk inside the craft, the tunnel connected to the Lucre Main, and the airlock remotely opened. Two Keila officials, similarly dressed to Flint, stepped into the craft.
“Come with us,” the first official ordered.
Flint, Aurein, and Allef followed the officials through the narrow, cramped tunnel lit only by scant LED lights on the “roof.” Up and down were subjective here in the tunnel, which was free of the influence of artificial gravity generators, and the stomachs of the three did a funny flip as they stepped out of the artificial gravity of the Lucre Main and into a weightless tunnel.
They entered the checkpoint ship and experienced its own artificial gravity, which was both stronger and oriented in a different direction than the Lucre Main’s. There was another nauseating lurch as Flint entered this new gravity, but it quickly vanished and barely crossed his mind—living and moving around in space, one quickly grew used to rapid changes in gravity, the destruction of up and the annihilation of down, but more importantly the slippery tangibility of the concept of orientation at all. Once up and down were reestablished in Flint’s mind and his internal organs had settled in place, a new armed soldier closed the tunnel behind them and the three were led to a series of machines.
The interior of the ship looked like a security checkpoint, at least. The room was small and heavily guarded. However, there were few scanners at all—unlike public safety security checkpoints present on less advanced planets designed only to prohibit lesser terrorism—the destruction of a single building or spacecraft, perhaps—Keila was focused on preventing terrorism on the interplanetary scale. No such antimatter or massive-scale fusion bomb could fit on a single person, so all of the interior scanners were dedicated to confirming the identity of the scanned. The exterior scanners on the checkpoint ship, which Flint couldn’t see from inside of the ship but could hear whirring and moving, were the ones scanning the Lucre Main for any kind of superweapon, remotely probing its structure and contents with electromagnetic waves of almost every variety.
Flint was the first to be brought to an eye scanning machine. First, he was asked his identity.
“Rechnoi Erzel,” Flint replied.
His guard urged him forward and Flint leaned towards the eye scanner’s sensors. Once his face had been pressed against the goggle-like contraption, a tiny screen inside asked his eyes to follow the movement of a small, moving red dot. As Flint did, keeping the red dot in his vision, his peripheral was filled with almost imperceptible, strobe-like white flashes. When the scan was done, Flint’s identity was confirmed on a larger screen on the scanning machine.
Flint’s guard nodded with approval and ordered Flint to return to the Lucre Main as the other two were scanned, but he lingered behind. When Allef and Aurein’s scans were finished, it was revealed that Tro had not betrayed them and their new fake identities really matched their new altered eyes.
“You may pass,” the head Keila official said, and they were free to go.
From orbit, it looked like Nopetu was spinning.
Of course, Nopetu was spinning—every celestial body in the universe contained some kind of rotational momentum relative to something. But even from space, it looked like the planet itself was rotating at a rate fast enough to see. On closer inspection, the moving objects were not landmasses—they were clouds. The surface of the planet was obscured by endless, rapidly moving clouds.
Having been a part of Talo for the better part of his involvement with the Domain, he didn’t know much about the heart of Keila. It was a surprise for him to see that Keila’s capital planet was tidally locked to its host star—one side of the planet faced the star at all times, and the other side was locked in an eternal night. This was curious from an astronomical perspective, as well—tidal locking didn’t often occur in planets that were this far from their host star.
The Lucre Main locked onto a nearby Keila ship which was descending towards Nopetu’s surface. Flint navigated the Lucre Main to follow it down—while they had assumed the identities of actual Keila members, they didn’t know the protocol of entering the faction’s capital city. And, judging by the perpetually moving clouds, entering Nopetu’s atmosphere would be no easy task.
“Flint,” Aurein started, looking intently at a screen on the Lucre Main’s dashboard. “Our target is entering a high-inclination orbit.”
“Follow, then,” Flint replied. “Tempest City must be closer to the poles than we expected. No big deal.”
“And I think I know how we’re supposed to get to Tempest City. We’re going to ride the wind.”
Flint got up from the navigator’s seat and looked at Aurein’s screen.
“See the wind direction?” Aurein pointed. The data on the screen indicated that Nopetu’s intense winds didn’t blow around the planet in a ring like most planets’ winds did—instead of left to right or right to left, the winds blew from the planet’s cool side to its hot side.
“We’re supposed to… ride it?” Flint clarified.
“That’s what this person is doing. If they were going to decelerate any more, they would have done so already. They have their flight path set to enter Nopetu’s atmosphere at full speed in the same direction as the wind.”
“But it says the winds on Nopetu are almost 200 meters per second! That’s faster winds than there are on some gas giants!”
“Two hundred?!” Allef exclaimed. She was stationed further back in the ship, operating on her mechanical arm instead of participating in navigation, but Flint’s remark had grabbed her attention and she perked up in disbelief.
“They don’t call it ‘Tempest City’ for nothing,” Flint commented.
“How can there be a ground-based city on a planet with 200 meter per second winds? How does someone even build that?!” Allef asked, also coming over to Aurein’s screen to confirm the information. “No building can just survive winds like that, much less be built in such conditions!”
“Well, unless the Keila ship we’re following is just flying straight into Nopetu’s surface for fun, Tempest City has got to exist there. I think it’s a deliberate decision on Keila’s part,” Flint said.
“What is?” Aurein asked.
“Putting their major headquarters in an inhospitable place. It’s the same thing Talo did, remember? You can’t just enter Talo’s domes without dealing with the intense heat and dust storms, and you have to be very familiar with Talo to understand how to do that safely. It’s gotta be a way to weed out the fakers and spies.”
“Like us,” Allef commented.
“But this makes the desert around Talo’s domes seem pathetic,” Aurein said. “One wrong move here, and we’re dead. These winds can tear a ship apart.”
“Then we’d better not mess up,” Flint said.
With the help of Aurein’s flight data, Flint altered the Lucre Main’s flight path to match the ship they were following. For a long time, they slowly sank closer and closer to Nopetu’s hazy surface, until, when they began to enter Nopetu’s atmosphere, the Lucre Main began to shake. The Lucre Main was still traveling parallel to the wind, but at the extreme orbital speed they were entering the atmosphere at, even Nopetu’s fast-moving winds seemed stationary in comparison. Over time, the Lucre Main’s speed fell along with its altitude, and simultaneously, as Nopetu’s atmosphere became thicker, the winds become more powerful. Through the thick, turbulent atmosphere, Aurein’s scanners had a hard time keeping track of the ship they were following several miles in front of them. The ship’s engine plume was the only thing they could detect.
Aurein’s anxious face, affixed to the flight path screen, became a look of horror.
“They turned off their engine!” Aurein declared to the other two.
“What?!”
“They’re letting the wind carry them the rest of the way! We need to do the same! Flint, cut the engine!”
Flint hesitantly obliged. The ship lurched as the wind took over the job of navigation. Nopetu’s atmosphere, now completely absent of the thrust plume of the ship ahead of them, was dark and purple with a hint of blue. The gargantuan winds covering almost the entire planet had picked up various chemicals that dyed the air a hazy mauve. The haze combined with the wind’s turbulence caused visibility to reduce to a few dozen feet, but surrounded by nothing but atmosphere for several miles, visibility was effectively naught.
The bumpy trip through Nopetu’s winds continued for a painfully long time with seemingly no progress. The only sounds in the cabin of the Lucre Main were the urgent warning beeps of an unstable trajectory and the rattling of metal. Then, all of a sudden, the proximity alarms began to beep and a bright blue light whizzed by the right side of the ship, shining brief light through the windshield and casting sweeping shadows of the three on the inside of the cabin. The proximity alarms calmed, leaving the three in a state of confusion.
“The hell was that?!” Allef exclaimed.
“Was that a ship?! Going into the wind?!” Flint exclaimed. The two looked over at Aurein and his radar screen for answers.
“No, that was a stationary object,” Aurein said, playing back the flight logs on his screen. “One of four, actually, all to our right. All four objects appear to be separated by a mile from each other in a diamond shape, and we passed the left-most one… what the hell? The hell are these things?”
The proximity alarms beeped again and another light passed the right side of the ship, dimmer this time.
“There it is again!” exclaimed Allef.
“Same thing,” Aurein said, looking at the screen. “Four objects oriented in a vertical diamond, closer together this time. Wait…”
Flint watched Aurein’s screen as Aurein manipulated the radar map their ship had automatically created into a 3d render of the surroundings they had passed. By the time a third set of lights had passed the right side of the Lucre Main, even farther away this time, the 3d render made it clear what the lights were.
“They’re shaped in a cone,” Aurein announced. “A funnel. They’re trying to funnel us towards one point.” Aurein turned to Flint, wide-eyed. It wasn’t often Flint saw this level of panic in Aurein. “We’ve been passing the guidelines that are guiding us to the landing area! We’re almost a whole mile off course! Flint, navigate, now! NOW!”
Flint whipped towards the throttle of the ship and, filled with wind and a foreign atmosphere, the engines sputtered to life. The three were slammed into their seats as Flint navigated the ship to the right and cranked up the throttle in a desperate attempt to follow the guiding lights. Steadily, the funnel-like set of lights came into view as the Lucre Main powered through the wind towards the correct flight path, but the neck of the funnel appeared to be tightening quickly.
Then, on the radar, it came into view—a gargantuan building with a hundred-foot wide square opening—their destination. However, according to the Lucre Main’s flight path, they were way off from the path that they were supposed to be taking described by the guiding lights. Going the way they were now, they would crash right into the side of the building at several hundred meters per second. At that speed, there would be nothing left of the Lucre Main or its destination.
Below the Lucre Main, a vast, dark ocean came into view as the ship fell lower and lower to the surface. Lit only by the scant light coming from the dark purple atmosphere, the sea looked as if it was made of dark purple acid. Massive waves were whipped into foam by the maelstrom, lapping at a quickly-approaching coastline where a field of colossal wind turbines was built, each one sporting frantically-spinning blades and popping into view one by one as the wind carried the Lucre Main towards their fate.
Flint turned the ship around with another sickening lurch, turning the Lucre Main so that it partially faced the wind. He cranked the engine up higher and the ship was consumed by bone-rattling convulsions, watching with blurred vision as the Lucre Main’s flight path slowly fit into the guiding funnel. The moment Aurein’s screen told him the Lucre Main would successfully fly into the building, he let go of the throttle and let the wind take control. He reoriented the ship with the wind and prepared the Lucre Main’s landing gear. Carried by the wind, the Lucre Main soared past several wind turbines which were even bigger up close. The guiding lights around the ship converged onto a single point—the entrance of the massive building. The Lucre Main barely made it into the entrance, clipping one of its guiding wings on the way in.
Inside of the massive building was a colossal runway in both length and height, which the Lucre Main unceremoniously skidded across for hundreds of feet. Once the ship had been carried deep into the building, the wind began to dissipate, and the Lucre Main eventually came to a stop.
The three were still with shock as runway workers began to surround the ship. Bright blue lights shone down upon them from the ceiling of this massive hangar, illuminating the runway workers coming into view—each one was wearing a sleek, clear gas mask connected to a small tank of air on their back. The shock between the three broke, and they too put on gas masks.
When Flint stepped outside of the Lucre Main, he was greeted not only with deafening whooshing and the powerful winds that threatened to push him over even at least a quarter mile into the building, but a powerful cold that the wind carried with it. The thick clothing of the Keila runway workers became clear, and one of them approached Flint with an angry look on her face. She looked like she was saying something, but it was then that Flint realized that he wasn’t tuned to Keila’s commonly-used frequency of radio communication. Flint altered a knob by his ear on his gas mask, and the worker’s voice blared.
“-hell were you thinking, coming in like that?!” she yelled.
“I sincerely apologize,” Flint replied. “There was an unexpected gust that threw us off-course.”
She looked at Flint disbelievingly, then another worker came up behind her.
“We have had reports of unexpected weather patterns off the coast. The possibility is very real.”
The head worker seemed not fully convinced. “Fine. Send a warning to the rest of the incoming ships. And, you.” The worker turned to Flint. “What’s your name?”
“Rechnoi Erzel.” Flint turned around to see Aurein and Allef exiting the Lucre Main. “This is Lazi Kobulia and Olph Ontar. We’re returning to Tempest City from the outer reaches for our duties.”
“Good. Go on ahead.” She threw her head in the direction of the exit. “The repair bill will be sent to you within a week.”
Through the exit, a long staircase took the three downwards to a yet unseen location. The bulk of the whooshing dissipated as they got further and further away from the windy entrance, but judging by the constant rushing sound above the tunnel they were descending in, they couldn’t have been far from the surface. Eventually, all sound dissipated except for their footsteps, and the three stepped onto the platform of an underground bullet train station. They didn’t wait any longer than twenty seconds before, with a blast of wind, the bullet train darted into view, slowing to a stop in moments. A number of Keila workers and soldiers stepped out, and Flint followed Aurein and Allef inside.
While the bullet train accelerated to its top speed in only a couple of seconds, Flint felt no movement. Artificial gravity generators had to have been installed within the train. The lights on the interior of the subway walls whizzed by, illuminating the cabin and its passengers like a strobe light. The bullet train continued its silent, magnetically-powered trip under the ground for a few more seconds before it suddenly emerged onto the surface, revealing a faraway image of the city they were approaching.
Its lights shone through the dark, hazy atmosphere, constantly flickering due to the turbulence. Tempest City was still too far away for the details of the buildings to be made out, but judging by the engineering-defying height of some of the lights that disappeared into the sky, it was massive. From the short glimpse Flint got of the city from afar before the bullet train dipped back underground, the city itself seemed to exude a certain defiance. Tempest City’s layout, its very nature, seemed to declare its status as a sin against nature, a technological feat that all odds would deem impossible, standing strong and tall against the perpetual wind.
The bullet train came to an abrupt stop at the same speed it accelerated, depositing Flint, Allef, and Aurein onto a crowded platform. Following directions to the residential buildings, the three walked onto a large, clear, cylindrical elevator, packing themselves in with the rest of the Keila officials and workers. The doors closed, and with a lurch—this elevator didn’t utilize artificial gravity to ease acceleration and deceleration—it rose smoothly upwards.
Flint watched his reflection in the glass as the elevator rose through a silver metal tube, finding the stoic faces of Allef and Aurein reflected in the glass among the crowd. Then, all of a sudden, what was once a reflection of Flint’s face became a bright, vast cityscape, the elevator ascending from an opaque tube to a transparent one that clearly displayed Tempest City before them.
Buildings rose from the bottom of Flint’s viewpoint and extended beyond the highest point he could see, hiding their tops from his limited viewpoint. Golden yellow lights cut through the blue-purple haze, emerging from countless windows on countless buildings. Each building was rounded, shaped like a teardrop from above, wide from one angle and thin from another like an airfoil. The architecture of the entire city was aerodynamic to avoid resistance from the wind, the shape of the buildings themselves cutting through the tempest like a field of glowing vertical blades.
Built within the twilight zone of a tidally-locked planet, Tempest City knew no night and day. The metropolis was trapped at the intersection between the two, the sun always rising and setting at once, hanging halfway over the horizon—not that anyone could ever see the sun; the thick purple atmosphere blocked any and all direct sunlight, leaving only the colors and a faint glow from above.
Their mere presence in this location was a testament to the progress they had made. Everything Flint, Aurein and Allef strove for had culminated in this moment, standing in an elevator as they rose through the heart of Keila’s central headquarters, Tempest City, the yellow lights shining on Flint and Allef’s amazed faces as they took in the sight. Even Aurein, usually stoic, could hardly suppress awe at the image of a city built for the wind, trapped in twilight, a glowing bastion that shone through the dark atmosphere.
And, wordlessly, the three knew that here, regardless of how, everything would come to an end.
