Kaldean Chronicles: Kaldean Sunset (Book I) (3 page)

This meant that there were always people on the streets, so the prince raised his hood and used a red rag to cover his face. He didn't want to get recognized while he made his way into the engineering district.

The houses were simple single-level structures made of white carbon. They were durable but didn't amount to much. For the most part they were temporary structures used when the servants visited the ship for business, so most of them were empty.

Antoni could find Rafael's house easily enough. He met the boy when he was ordering a concubine. It was his first, and he was very nervous. He was always allowed the use of an Orchid. That was not taboo at all unless he was married, and even then it wasn't a big deal. He just had that pubescent anxiety, which got a lot worse when a boy his age walked in with a cocky grin on his face. He had the strangest hair. It was long on one end and short on the other so that it fell down at a point on the right side, where it was dyed from dark brown to white. He never wore anything except black leggings, black robes and black shirts. It was weird, but his playful attitude was intriguing. When they were done with transaction, Rafael left him a paper note inviting Antoni to meet him in the servant complex.

Antoni had never been down there before, and he was scared. He wasn't going to do it at first, but he decided that it might be a good idea. He never got to have any fun. When he did go down there, Rafael told him, in between puffs of smoke weed, about a network of tunnels that spanned the entire ship. It was used to regulate airflow, and maintain the temperature, but it was completely abandoned. The servant children used it as a getaway where they could have a quick drink and smoke in privacy away from the prying eyes of adults who might not approve of their activities.

The idea of privacy was completely foreign to Antoni. It was one of the few luxuries that he had been denied. As the heir to the Empire, his body, his actions and his mind were treated as a piece of property that must be closely guarded. This was the first time he'd gone anywhere without his guards and it was an amazing feeling.

This would only be his third meeting with Rafael, but they were becoming fast friends. Antoni would tell him about his life, and Rafael would tell him about his. Antoni was surprised by the way the boy lived. The only time he had any responsibility was when he worked with his father. When he wasn't in the palace, he traveled in his space folding ship. He could go wherever he wanted so long as he returned to his parent's house periodically to check in.

He told Antoni stories he could barely believe—things about anti-technologist colonies in the far reaches, and alien landscapes with pink skies and purple jungles. His stories gave Antoni a glimpse of the galaxy that he had never seen before.

In contrast, Antoni's stories were boring. He told Rafael about meeting public figures, the local rulers of major systems, and the Mother Superior of the Lorian Sisterhood, but those stories bored Rafael. He didn't care about politics. He was an adventurer who just wanted to live his life and have fun.

It was Rafael's vocation that Antoni envied the most. His father was an engineer for the Orchid Sisters, an ancient organization that sold custom concubines. They were considered to be the finest women in the galaxy with bodies and minds perfectly engineered to please men, offering a sublime experience which could only be described as bliss. When Rafael's father died, he would fill his father's position in the organization and have the privilege of working with the women every single day.

Antoni walked up to his friend's house, and waited in front of the tiny door. Rafael had installed a visual sensor above the door. The boy ran out and met his friend right away.

“Hey, come around to my room. My mom is here.”

“Okay.” Antoni walked around to the second window on the right side and waited for Rafael to open the window. When he did, he climbed out.

“You should take that rag off.”

“No. I don't want people to recognize me.”

“It looks ridiculous.” Rafael snatched it off his face, and ran towards the street. Antoni bolted after him.

“Get the fuck back here!” he yelled.

Rafael crossed the street and darted between two houses. Antoni barely missed getting hit by a transport with a young woman inside. She was staring at him with a shocked look on her face.

She must've recognized him.

The situation was serious. He was completely unguarded. Antoni had to stop playing around and get that rag right away, but it was already getting hard to run. He was dripping with sweat and the heat was turned up too high. He didn't want to have to keep running, and darting through houses but Rafael was fast and he couldn't catch up.

This was dangerous. He couldn't allow himself to be recognized because his father would raise an alert and half the Jihadi army would start looking for him. His father might even declare a state of emergency and halt transports in and out of the palace. The worst part was that when they found him, Rafael would probably be taken in for interrogation.

The boy was putting himself at risk, and Antoni was powerless to stop it. All he could do was run and hope that Rafael got tired. He made a right and began leading Antoni to a wall, a black structure that looked as if it was more than a dozen meters tall. He watched as his friend darted past a transport, waving the rag in the air, and disappeared behind incoming traffic. When the transport passed, he was nowhere to be seen.

Antoni was left exposed and hysterical standing in the middle of a busy intersection, praying that nobody recognized him. This was a complete disaster, and he wasn't going to get out of it. All he could do was keep on the move, so he ran towards the wall where Rafael had been standing. There was a house on one end and a cafe on the other. Both were attached to the wall, and both were locked down and empty. There was no place for Rafael to go, yet somehow he disappeared.

This is bullshit
, he thought.

Antoni began pacing around, trying to decide what to do next. He could easily head back upstairs and accept the consequences of his actions, but his father would probably enact some form of brutal punishment, and Antoni wanted to avoid it as long as he possibly could.

There was nothing else to do - somebody was going to say something. One of the servants would eventually hunt down a Jihadi and report him, then he would be forcibly brought to his father. Last time he got punished, he was forced to sit in his room and undergo 16 straight hours of mental exams, ranging from advanced mathematics to history. Antoni was still scarred from the experience, and he was going to get a lot worse this time.

Rafael was probably trying to get him into trouble. Antoni thought of trying to bribe one of the guards to have him killed, but that wasn't the right thing to do. He was young and bored, probably trying to play games with the prissy prince who didn't know anything about the world.

Fuck!

He kicked the wall and his foot went straight through. It was a hologram. He was so stupid. “I'm gonna fuck you up!”

Rafael started giggling on the other side.

Antoni rushed through and slammed his head on the ceiling. He fell flat on his back with half his body in the passage and the top half sticking out the other side.

“Oh that's just fucking classic,” he said. Rafael grabbed his feet and started pulling him in, laughing the entire time. Antoni kicked him in the face and he fell down.

“You stupid fuck!” Antoni stood up to find himself in a short passage lit only by tiny lights on the ceiling. It seemed to go on for miles. “If we get caught, the Jihadis are gonna beat you senseless when they interrogate you.”

“It's not gonna happen.”

“It might,” he reasoned.

“They don't come down here. They don't police the complex. They could give a shit less what we do, so long as we don't to the upper levels without permission.”

“Oh.” That made sense. The Jihadis in the palace were there to protect the royal family. They didn't have any reason to bother with the servants. “What about visual sensors?”

“If there were sensors, trust me, they would've caught you by now.”

“Seriously!? Shit. I can go here any time I want. I had no idea.”

“Why else do you think I brought you here, stuffed up in that bourgeoisie fucking prison all the time. You were going crazy. It was obvious. I'll bet that was the first time you even fucked somebody.”

Antoni refused to admit that, “At least I can afford a concubine.”

“Please, I get all the concubines I want and I don't have to pay a fucking credit.”

Antoni began to look around. The tunnel was barely lit, made of black carbon, a cheap impenetrable material. “Where does this lead?”

“Come on,” Rafael helped him up and they started walking.

“Does it go far?”

“No. This tunnel is just an entrance, but the tunnels go on for miles and miles. It spans the entire ship. Some of the boys were saying that it connects to every single room in the palace.”

“There's no way. They would've built a separate system for certain areas.”

“Things you're not supposed to get to?” Rafael turned to Antoni but he didn't respond. Of course the state had secrets, and some of them were in the palace, but he wasn't going to talk about them.

“We're almost there. I can see something.” Antoni pointed to a glimmer of light a little lower than the rest, and they made their way towards it. He hadn't been paying much attention to the walls, but he thought he could make out little patterns etched into the sides. He pointed at them. “What is that?”

“Graffiti.”

“What's graffiti?”

“Stupid shit. Kids will carve their names into things and stupid sayings. It's a way of expressing yourself and saying that you were there.”

“Huh.” The people had strange customs, things he didn't understand, and he suspected he never would. He was reminded every day just how disconnected he was by the rest of society.

Almost as if he was reading Antoni's thoughts, Rafael turned to him. “Your father doesn't talk to us. He doesn't do anything for us, and he does not know us. Don't make the same mistake.”

“I haven't seen any problems. I thought things were going well.” There were whispers, but that's all they were.

“It isn't. There's violence and uprisings in the outer reaches, invasions that go ignored. There's things out there that want us dead, and nobody is fighting them because your father doesn't keep an eye on the Empire. He doesn't know what's best.”

“You think I should go out and talk to the people?”

“How are you going to know how to rule if you don't understand what's going on?”

That was some pretty sound logic. “I think you're right.”

“I am,” he was certain. “You hear it every day.”

“Every day?”

“You don't know. We've got pirates, anti-tech groups raiding Empire planets, underground human slavery, corruption. It all goes unchecked because the palace won't even travel to a populous system. Your father hasn't even been seen in public for years. It's gotta stop.”

Antoni had better listen, because if he wanted to be honest, he had heard some of this in closed circles. The servants would whisper in the halls and the academics would debate it quietly, but none of these things were spoken about openly. “I will keep it in mind. I've heard some of this, but not to any great extent.”

“I'm not political, but this shit's getting ridiculous.”

The boys entered a domed room, nearly 20 feet tall where tiny passages just like the one they'd left lined the walls. There were more than two dozen of them. Rafael took out a glow pen from a pocket in his cloak and marked an X on the floor. “You ever come here, mark an X on the floor when you leave a tunnel. That's how people find their way.”

“Got it.”

Rafael handed him a glow pen, “Where do you want to go?”

“I wanna see the higher levels.” Antoni didn't go up there much. It was where his father conducted business and he was interested to see what it was like.

Rafael laughed, “Good choice. I was thinking the Orchid baths myself, but I think we'll try your idea instead. The girls get kind of boring after a while.”

“Do they have to make them so stupid?”

“A lot of men like it. I choose the smarter ones personally. It's fun to sit and talk with them.”

Emperor Victor Leon's massive form was accented by a mean face, one which seemed to stare right through you. At 415 years old, He had seen the galaxy, lived in the purple jungles, and crawled through crystal caves. He could go wherever he wanted, but in his old age the only place he wanted to be was in his palace where he was safe and comfortable.

It didn't matter what people had to say. He was aware of the issues his Empire was facing, but he took a detached approach, because society had to develop freely. The people must be allowed to live as they wished or else they would rebel against the Empire. If Victor oppressed one group for the harm they caused, even the pirates, that group might rise up and overthrow him. If he were to go the outer reaches and kill off the sentients, they could easily fight against him. Yes, he had enemies, and so did the people, but he could keep them at bay without wiping them out, and in doing so he could avoid disaster.

He was standing in his closet, staring at the mirror. He threw on his white robe and red cloak then walked into his chambers, where his Orchids were sleeping peacefully. He quietly left them there and walked out into the hall where six Jihadis were waiting to escort him into the meeting hall.

He walked slowly, taking his time to mull over what was ahead of him. The sisterhood and the Empire had been cooperating for thousands of years, and their relationship had always been cordial, but he didn't trust them. The Sisterhood didn't forget easily. He wanted to be certain that they didn't hold any ancient grudges, but it was impossible to know whether or not they were loyal.

They had their secrets, and he was never going to find out what they were. The people admired them as much as they admired the Kaldeans, if not more. They never forgot who gave them the power to fold space, and the religious fervor that started with the Blood Jihad spread like wildfire. The people would fight for them, even overthrow the Kaldeans if they commanded it. They'd give their lives for their faith, and did so readily if the occasion called for it. Victor was required to pay homage to the sisters at every turn. They got whatever they wanted, and though they never really asked for much, they displayed their power on a regular basis.