The Ballad of the Gods: Part 1 | Short Story

As the system gathers for a once in a generation celestial event, a mysterious drifter is looking for a way off-world. And, if she's not careful, she might just find one

Part One: Questions Without Answers

1.

Under the brilliant night sky of Seris, Yesterday once again found herself out of her depth. Hickson Bast, a thud of a man who currently towered over her in a damp corner of Isa City, wore a perpetual frown that said ‘I have a very short fuse and I actually enjoy when it burns out’.

Put plainly, Bast looked like he was in no mood for a negotiation. Unfortunately for Yesterday, she was desperate. She wasn’t so much afraid for her life, big men move slowly giving her at least one advantage, but she was concerned that the job she was in the process of agreeing to wouldn’t get her where she wanted to be, which was as far away from here as possible.

“Final offer,” Bast said, his voice every bit as blunt as his fists.

“Come on, we can work something out here, right?” Yesterday said, taking one incredibly small and tentative step towards the man.

They were standing in an alley just off the main avenue deep within the bowels of Isa City. Even though most off-world folk would kill to see the neon streets and needle skyscrapers of Seris’s largest city, Yesterday was very much done with it.

She didn’t much care for spending more than a few cycles in any given place and prided herself on her ability to find an escape route. Usually ones that didn’t involve hitmen like Bast but needs must.

The Ballad had begun, taking over the streets of Isa and painting them deep shades of purple and dusk. A brilliant dance between two worlds at the edges of Scikera’s twin star systems, Gods entwined in a perpetual waltz across the stars.

That Yesterday had arrived here during The Ballad was merely a coincidence. She never ventured to a place without a purpose and Isa City was no different. It was yet another stop in her journey to fill in the faded memories she had lost all those years ago. However, Isa City had left her with more questions than answers.

Still, while she was on Seris, she had every intention of finally seeing the strange and mysterious celestial ritual, one whose legend looms large in even the most remote reaches of Scikera.

The influx of pilgrims and tourists all hoping to gaze upon The Ballad of the Gods, hoping to feel the pull and push of two worlds as they passed each other in the void of space, made the city a great place to ask questions without being noticed.

As was the way, she had arrived on a passenger charter with little more than a hunch and instructions to ask for a man named Bolland in a bar on the outskirts of the city. The lead hadn’t panned out and her coin had dried up leaving her with no choice but to blend in with the chorus of locals and off-world folk all waiting to experience something beautiful and unknowable.

And, for a while, she did. She’d picked up a few jobs here and there, bussing tables in a local tavern, riding packages across the city for rich assholes. No jobs that make full use of her unique skill set, but enough to keep her fed and housed.

The problem laid out before her was a familiar one. Making enough coin to survive was different to making enough coin to get her where she wanted to go. She knew that to finally get off Seris and continue her journey, she would need to turn to her gift and a reputation, she discovered, that very much preceded her.

2.

Finding Bast was easy. It turns out he was familiar with her work, so he more or less found her.

“Heard you was working here,” Bast had said at their first meeting in the Atlantia. Yesterday had been tending the bar during one of her many odd jobs around the city.

It was little more than a room with an illfitting bar and missmatched tables, the kind of hovel that was thrown together to capitalise on the increased patronage of the city. It didn’t much matter to Yesterday, though. She’d been in far worse places.

“And you are?”

“In search of someone with your particular skill set.”

“And what might that be?” she asked, drying off a glass and pouring Bast a pint of ale.

“I was told that a gumshoe named Yesterday was pouring pints in this very establishment,” he said. “And that this, Yesterday, might be in need of work?”

“Who’d you hear this off?”

“If you are who I think you are then your reputation precedes you.”

She passed the man his drink, his hand almost as large as the glass as he lifted it to swallow almost half of its contents in one gulp.

“In my line of work, you hear things,” Bast continued. “Stories, mostly bullshit blown out of proportion, no doubt. Stories of a particular gumshoe with an unnatural ability to acquire pretty much any information anyone needs. Information that, in some cases, nobody should know.”

“Tall tales.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Stories.”

He finished his pint and passed Yesterday a roll of coin.

“Still, if you are the one they call Yesterday and you are in search of work that better befits someone of your skillset then there’s always work to be done down here in the mud.”

Bast flashed her a strange, unsettling grin before heading out into the neon light of Isa City. That grin told her everything she needed to know about Bast. It unsettled her, told her to find another way. But the frustration was growing, she was becoming trapped in her own obsession. She had questions, gaps to fill in her mind and Bast was, regrettably, a necessary evil.

3.

By this point, with the apex of The Ballad only one cycle away, the streets of Isa were packed. Some were religious types wearing traditional dress robes that bore the twin worlds of Seris and Calibray embroidered on the finest silks in the system. Some folks were already deep into drink or drugs, watching in amazement as the impossible filled the sky above. Others, Yesterday suspected, were like her. Hoping to go unnoticed in amongst all the noise.

Inky black flags baring the Serisian insignia - crossed hands cradling an orb - hung down from the tops of buildings, covering windows and doors like veils. It was behind one of these veils that Yesterday and Bast were currently negotiating.

“You can’t track the target without me,” Yesterday said, “we originally had a fair price.”

“I don’t need to track the target,” he said, one hand wrapped around the pistol strapped to his hip. “I can just kill them all.”

“And have the TSC rain down on you?”

“How do you know they ain’t the ones that hired me?”

Yesterday ran her hand through her hair. It had gotten too long, hanging down over her eye. She needed off this planet. She needed a haircut.

“Fine,” she said, “you win.”

Bast lifted his hand from his pistol.

“But I want half up front, enough to buy me a pass off this rock,” she said.

He cocked an eyebrow, “fine. But screw this up and I will very much enjoy killing you.”

4.

The Ballad of the Gods, or so the locals called it, was the point at which the outermost planets of the Hellan Minor and Major systems passed by in their perpetual dance. A celestial event that occurred once every several hundred cycles causing strange and unexplainable phenomena across Seris. Unexplained because such phenomena differed with each successive Ballad.

Sometimes the gravitational pull would shift causing onlookers to become unmoored from the ground and drift into the sky. Once, if the stories are to be believed, the Ballad caused all who gazed upon its cosmic majesty to go totally and inexplicably mad. Whatever this particular cycle held in store for the Ballad’s many onlookers, Yesterday knew it would provide her the ideal cover.

The job was simple. Meander through the crowd. Make her way to the staging area where two metallic orbs were being readied for the ceremonial pyre that signaled the official start of the Ballad celebrations. Slip passed whatever guards were stationed near the edge of the Confederation embassy and land in the room where she’d put her gift to use. Gift, she thought to herself, a strange way to describe the violent colonisation of her mind.

5.

She was as ready as you could be for a nighttime jaunt into the heart of a TSC facility. Her gun was strapped to her hip, not that she had any intention of using it. It was hidden beneath a red jacket she wore buttoned to just below her neck over the top of an off white shirt. Add to that a pair of white shoes and black cargo trousers and she figured she was dressed about as well as she could be to blend in with the military types that frequent these sorts of facilities across Scikera.

Then there were her gloves. Black leather over the top of a custom fabric that she had woven herself. It was the only way she could be sure she knew where it came from. The only way the fabric wouldn’t flood her brain with a million unwanted memories. They were her shields, her protection against the unfurling history desperately trying to needle its way into her brain.

The humid air mixed with sweat and the ceaseless roiling clamor of the crowd causing her shirt to feel slimy and slick against her skin. An uncomfortable feeling at the best of times but especially so as she prepared to join the throng. She took the long ends of her brown hair in her hands and quickly tucked it into a bun on the back of her head before stepping out into the street.

She wove against the current of people, heading back towards a towering monolith that stood sentry at the end of the avenue. Her hands felt warm within her gloves, sweat soaking into the fabric layer. Uncomfortable as it was, she was never tempted to take them off. She’d sooner lose her hands than take off her gloves and open herself up to all the noise of the universe.

One man, shorter than her and wearing a face pained half red and black, cradling a metal tankard of Serisian ale bumped her shoulder as she moved through the crowd.

“Excuse me,” he said, turning to look at her.

“Excused,” she said, flashing a quick smile at the man before stepping forward.

“Hold on,” he said, grabbing at her wrist. It was only a second but that second was long enough. The sticky, ale soaked finger tip of the man’s right hand made contact with the skin of her wrist as her momentum and his grasp pulled her sleeve away from the edge of her glove.

It might as well have been an eternity. A lifetime unspooling in her mind. A thousand days spent living the same routine, living for the next drink. She felt the man’s life fill her brain until her cup overflowed. For a second, she was someone else, witnessing his life through her own eyes. Time had folded into itself creating a book she could read forwards, backwards and from the inside.

Sleep. Wake. Work. Drink. An endless cycle punctuated only by a string of unfulfilling dalliances. Sleep. Wake. Work. Drink. A trail of discarded featureless women in his wake. This was his life and she was witnessing it all in one single blink.

She pulled herself back to the present by taking the cool metal of her gun from its holster and burying it deep into the man’s side. He winced, his drink splashing to the floor with a delicate dink that was barely audible over the rapturous din of the crowd.

“Let go of me or I’ll give you more than a hangover to worry about tomorrow,” she said.

He withdrew his hand, “calm down...”

Before he could finish, Yesterday brought the handle of her gun up into his nose with a loud crack. A stream of blood poured out of the man’s face as he crumpled to the floor.

She could still feel the man’s past pressed into her brain like footprints, the ocean of her own memories slowly washing them away. Too slowly, she thought, as she made it to the edge of the crowd.

She found herself at the foot of the needlessly imposing set of marble stairs that led up to the facility. It was Isa Cities Thousand Suns Confederation Embassy and so, as the TSC were fond of saying, it justified its exuberance as a means of demonstrating the true strength of the Confederation across all of its many worlds.

All Yesterday could think, was that she’d have to climb them all. And climb them she did, driven by the unending need to move forward. To answer those deeply rooted questions that had consumed her long ago. For someone with such a reputation for answering the questions of others, that she still had yet to find her own answers was equal parts irritating and funny. Still, the search was her engine and, right now, that engine was powering her up the stairs to the Confederation embassy in Isa City.

“Building is off limits, citizen,” the guard said.

“I’m sooo sorry,” she said, slurring her words. She stumbled forward, the guard catching her as she fell.

“I was looking for the bathroom,” she said. “Guessing this isn’t it?”

“Bathroom is that way,” the guard said, helping her to her feet.

“Thank you,” she said, punching the man’s arm. She smirked, “have a good evening, Sir.”

Yesterday turned on her heels, looked down the stairs, sighed, and started a long, unsteady walk back towards the street. When she finally reached the bottom of the steps, out of sight of the guard posted at the front of the building, she glanced down to her hand revealing a data card.

The small plastic square, emblazoned with a particularly unflattering holo of the guard alongside his designation. 02357. Such a lovely name, she thought. She fixed her jacket and stowed the card in her breast pocket before slinking away down a side street leading off to the left of the facility.

6.

Shaking off her performance and wishing she was drunk, Yesterday made her way towards the back of the TSC facility. This was the part of her plan where she was relying on the universe affording her just enough luck to see her through the maintenance entrance without issue.

To her relief, the two guards she’d expected to find either side of the small metal door were nowhere to be seen. Either they were on patrol around the nearby streets or they’d figured that on a night where everyone in the city is gathered on a few streets drinking or praying or both, they’d probably be able to get off a touch early. Not that it mattered to her. She pressed herself against the door, scanned the data card and forced the rusted metal open, hinges screaming at the strain.

The door opened onto a small service corridor, all rough concrete walls over the buildings slight metal skeleton that had hastily been erected at the end of the war. Not the picture of strength the TSC hoped to project. Water pooled in dips in the floor, dripping through cracks in the roof, the stagnant smell like blood in her mouth as she continued forward towards the doorway into the facility proper.

She pressed her ear up to the door and listened for footsteps, voices, breathing, anything that might tell her what she could expect when she opened the door. Two voices faintly conversed, passing by the door.

“...I’m telling you, this place is my nightmare, we don’t belong...” the voices faded to a whisper and then to silence. Yesterday took a deep breath, slow, considered, counting in and out before taking the door handle and opening onto another hallway in the facility.

There was a marked difference between where she’d come from and where she was now. She slowly closed the door to the service corridor, one side scuffed metal and the other covered in ornate wood imported from the palace gardens on Calon. The hallway was lit with an array of lamps each with a golden stem and a shade that bore the names of every person who lost their life during the war - all writ with golden filigree on frosted white glass.

The walls were papered in a textured hexagonal pattern that continued the gold accents from the lights leading to wooden panels that matched the wood of the door at her back. Over the decoration sat an array of pictures, paintings depicting key moments in the TSC’s rise to power. The first meetings that sparked their uprising against House Setia. The Desolation of Doraketh. The moment their armies triumphantly took the palace and executed the Tyrant King. The paintings were violent celebrations. Half memories, Yesterday thought.

Straight ahead, though, was a painting that drew Yesterday in like the gaping maw of a feeding kasewhale. A man with a grey beard around a block like face with two of the brightest emerald eyes she’d ever seen. Eyes she’d never be able to forget. Eyes that looked at her as though she was nothing but dirt beneath a boot. An inconvenience to be brushed off.

Samus Cardinal was the current leader of the High Council of the Thousand Suns Confederation and a man she’d only met once. Once when they’d sent Officers into the sewers beneath Calon to clear out the homeless population that had taken up residence in the underside of the city. A population that included her. A population that they decimated in one night.

She remembered him standing at the mouth of the sewers where they were leading any survivors out into the light to be shipped off-world to labour camps or prisons like Fendara. She remembered seeing the glee in those sharp, pin prick emerald eyes as he watched bodies being carried out by his soldiers in gas masks. He was a cleaner and was cleaning. That was before his time as leader of the council. Back then he liked to be there to watch the suffering he wrought first hand. Now, she thought, he had to settle for second hand accounts.

She gathered herself with another long breath in, holding it and exhaling before turning away from the portrait. She could feel him watching, as though his portrait were an extension of himself, just one of his thousands of eyes fixed on every corner of the system. She wanted out but the only way out was through. So she rounded a corner and made her way up a small staircase towards the main concourse. Two hallways flanked by offices stretched out ahead of and behind her.

She could hear the distant rumblings of what sounded like singing in the streets below and, for the briefest moment, felt a flicker of something like homesickness. Not so much for a place, she’d never had a home to feel sick for, more for the people who’d raised her. The people she’d left behind.

She studied the name tags hung to the left of each of the offices. Security personnel, lawmakers, policing, administrative staff.

She came to a stop outside the largest office, closest to the balcony. It’s occupant was Valero Stracken, the council member overseeing Seris. Lucky as she had been up to this point, she knew what to expect on the other side of that door.

She knew the office was empty as it often was. She knew that Stracken preferred to spend his time off-world in one of the Systems many pleasure houses, meaning she didn’t have to worry about getting caught. But it wasn’t getting caught that concerned her. It was what she might find on the other side of that door, what she might see when she finally took off her gloves and let in the noise.

End of Part 1. Part 2 coming Friday.