A Short Story set in the Orpheus Universe during the Fourth Schism
Join Lupin Jones as he uncovers the mystery of the Callisto Mines and threatens the galaxy with an unthinkable truth.
Chapter 3 coming soon.
Chapter 1
‘The stars have passed me by.’
I remember my grandmother telling me that just before her time… Now, it’s what I tell myself every day.
The revolution was meant to be a bridge into a new world! When Orpheus stormed the Capitol, ordinary people held their breaths; my people, however, rolled up our parchments and made ready to change the foundations of our society.
The bridge we built was two years in the making, and it had its cracks, and it had its flaws; but greatest of all, we did not know where we were building it to end up. Our hearts told us one thing – to be inspired by the passions of Orpheus, who in those formative days was like a fire that would never die down. He was the boy who built his own mountains and fought his own wars; he was the one that rose from the ashes to ignite the greatest movement in the history of humanity. Orpheus was a great one to follow; he had our hearts entwined with purpose. Yet our hearts were ill at ease. For in the midst of all of this, there was an entity that could only be described as parasitic. A journalist of over exaggerated proportions – Mister Faust…
We all knew the man, but I wouldn’t say we loved him. He was the one who allowed Orpheus to bring the Sentience War into being, something that enabled our survival, yes. But ever since then, he has been this unruly shadow, ever looming over galactic affairs and ever riding off of the boy’s popularity.
As with the war, Faust was integral to Orpheus’ revolution – so much so, that he all but hijacked it. However, perhaps that is a missight. It would be closer to the truth to say that Faust orchestrated the whole thing, and in light of that, it is no great mystery that he threw Orpheus to the sidelines, and that he has turned our bridge to rubble.
Great lawyers have been needed in every schism – in each reshaping of the Communion. Faust, but a journalist by trade, decided to take it upon himself to shape our side. Sentienism – the beautiful movement that was born to counter the xenophobia of the war – was suddenly devoured and regurgitated as something shallow and void of meaning. Something easier to shove down our throats, and something just as easy to digest. We became an entity inseparable from politics. Then, all too naturally, we became a military contender to our enemy – the Militant Faithful.
Faust did nothing to stop the growing hostilities; hell, he even sanctioned the storming of an old XA outpost on the metal moon. And that was us! We were the ones making the first moves in the conflict, and it was Orpheus shedding the blood – all for it to be dramatised the next day, all for it to seep into our lowly offices, where we were slowly accepting the cold truth that everything we thought we had built was now nothing at all. We were not even left with rubble to kick around; we were left with evaporated aspirations and broken dreams. And we had one of two choices: conform or defect.
~
The stars were passing me by…
An advert eyed me down; it had been illegally nailed into the bark of an ancient olive tree, those that were near sacred and close to the only flora on the metal moon. The paper was tatty, and its colours had separated in the tree sap. Great big letters shouted at me, ‘The Callisto Collective…’ And I suppose the whisky in my hand made it seem much more agreeable at the time. ‘Come work for us in the mines. Get away. Get paid. Accepting of all backgrounds.’
I finished the bottle, wandered on to my apartment and packed my bags. Then, with little to no thought, I went to the grand spaceport and booked passage to Trimagest – the hub of refinery and a place notorious for shady dealings and ‘open-minded’ customs officials.
All of the Foundry Worlds were, so far, detached from the turmoil around Centarion. But they were zones of contention, and I knew the feeling from before… when the whole world around you is just helplessly sliding into war… I could feel that again now – regardless of what certain pretentious professors would otherwise claim. And if war broke out, these worlds of industry would be the first to enter the fire. So, although the politics were warped here – with interest being in who could strike the best deal, rather than the best ideology – I could not stay. Even being here felt tantamount to walking on a tightrope.
Passage to the Callisto Mines had historically been guaranteed, and it still was! I had seen many court cases end with the judge’s hammer shattering one’s existence with a one way trip to the far belt. But now it was seemingly becoming a place of harbourage for the innocent too. I must admit that I only stopped to think about what I was doing when I had stepped onto the long-haul freighter that would eventually take me to the screening grounds that were situated on one of the planets in the Callisto constellation.
I had a long time to dwell on what was happening to me… and the galaxy. But it only took a moment for perilous visions to enter my mind – dark daydreams of Centarion in ruin.
The Sentience War had, in truth, barely scratched the surface of our civilisation. It was a horror for the soldiers and for certain less fortunate worlds, but for Centarion and the other worlds of influence, the war may as well have been some dream. Yet the same would not be true now – not with what was coming for us all.
We would no longer be fighting raptids, but our own blood. The violence would not start in distant stars; it would start right on our doorstep… And there was no hope! For I knew my kind; they did not want salvation because it was simpler to go to war. I knew the destruction would be boundless…
I was trying to get as far away as possible from this coming war – a war of two inglorious sides. A war that would be lost by everyone before it would even begin.
The mines were my escape, and in the days that I travelled towards them, the unknown became filled with warmth and feelings of comfort; I would even say. Of course, I had never seen them – these mines. I had only seen that colourful poster and those many others which all seemed to be dotted along my travels. A galaxy-stretching paper trail designed to capture the attention of the down-and-outs, the broken hearted, and disgraced lawyers such as myself – Mister Lupin Jones.
The closer I got to the mines, the more people I met who seemed to be heading in the same direction. Many of them were those looking for relatively well-paid work that they could do. ‘Just swinging a pickaxe…’ I heard mentioned more than once. Yet there were others amongst them who said little – ones who were like myself. I noticed that these people hid themselves away and kept to their own company. I wondered from which planets and star systems they had come from, and I wondered to which side they belonged… or had once belonged to.
When we reached the southern systems, I heard little of the once common grumblings of the Sentienists and the Militant Faithful. It seemed that down here, the politics truly were a galaxy away. It made me think long and hard about what the revolution was even about… and just what we thought we were trying to accomplish. Of course, we knew that the Militant Faithful had to be ousted from power, but beyond that? We, and our grand ideas, were trying to change everything. The whole galaxy was on the drawing board, and we thought that they wanted change. Yet here I was… People could not even tell you what had gone on in the past few years – and they were markedly happier for it, or happier than us at least.
The planets out here felt older – which was a strange irony. They could not, of course, be older than Centarion which was the birthplace of our species… And yet, the further I got from that citified world, the harder it became to believe that life had stemmed from there when everything here felt so much closer to nature and truer to life. There were less ideals; there was simply the wind in the air. And I hoped, and I begged, that the war would not reach it all the way out here – that it would burn furiously, and soon starve itself of fuel. Perhaps, the grander parts of our civilisation deserved a reckoning – but my heart yearned for the places that had nothing to do with it. The people here on the forest moon, as I observed them, were peaceful and at ease with the world around them. A few credits went far for them; they did not want for more. It was quite something to remember.
Many of the travellers heading to the Callisto Mines had come with the identities of impoverished souls. They were soon humbled here, when they saw houses that were made from no more than logs, and when they saw creatures roasting on spits rather than delicately served on platters or packaged in plastic. We stayed the night in this settlement; we were the sole freighter passing through, and so we were all met with something entirely new – silence.
Real silence.
It was only at the point of hearing it, or not hearing it, perhaps, that I realised that I had never experienced it before. Brought up in Centarion, I knew no quiet. Ships were blasting off from every quadrant; that was thunder bad enough. But it was the landing ships that made it hell. We called it the harpy’s horn – the sound they made when they entered the atmosphere. And then, with my schooling and career inside the metal moon, Centar’don, well, that was no better. Life inside a giant machine – it was no life at all.
Here there was nothing like that. It was just the sound of the birds and insects – sounds that I had only heard before on audio files. I had never thought to inquire where they came from, or just how astounding they would be when I heard them directly.
And then there were the stars above; over the horizon came the bright glitter of the galactic core, but overhead it was darker. I marked a long line of stars, stretching horizontally across half of the sky. That was the far belt, and the Callisto constellation lay on the other side – even further into the void.
The stars had quite literally passed me by.
A new life was beginning… and the mines would be my salvation!