TERMINAL ORIGINS

-1-

         The heavens had aligned so that the harbingers of fate, fortune, and destiny were prodding our nation and our world toward years of strife, turmoil, and cataclysm, and nothing would ever be the same again. The changes that were coming would prove to be a mixed blessing, or perhaps, a mixed curse. Like me, most of my loved ones, friends, and neighbors had little doubt that they were approaching fast, and they frightened us. We lived in a place called Orchard. Those of us who loved her were trapped between the spite of a natural wilderness and the malice of a wilderness claiming to be civilization. The latter was called Zebrekel. I can remember when her pernicious urbanscape was nearly a hundred miles farther away than it was during the times that I shall attempt to describe. Their currents proved to be all-too gloomy and perilous. Yet they also turned out to be among the most exciting times that Orchard ever hosted. Alas, their glory colored her final days. Appropriately enough, or so it seemed, their fatal inevitability began with the funeral of Shiharah Khazarial. None of us had ever expected her to die in her sleep. She had always seemed like a force of Nature—willful and irresistible--which had served her well, considering that she had reigned as our beloved matriarch for nearly a generation. As we buried her, many of us feared that our family would soon begin shrinking much too rapidly and that we might end up suffering through more funerals than we could easily endure. Among those who entertained such worries was Ezra Khazarial. Since he was the eldest son of Shiharah, he inherited her scepter and the responsibility of presiding over the House of Khazarial, as well as over Orchard and the Sand Rose Plantation.

         According to Ezra’s mother, he looked a lot like God. She had told me that she had seen the Lord of Hosts in various visions and dreams. Ezra claimed to have done so, too, and to have also seen Yoshi (the Messiah) both as he was before he died and as he has been ever since he rose from the dead. Of course, it’s natural to doubt such assertions. But I knew for certain that neither Ezra nor his mother was a liar. In fact, both of them had gotten into more than a few difficulties due to their nearly pathological inclination to tell the truth and speak their minds. Anyway, Ezra was lanky and senewy and had a complexion of light golden-brown. His face was ruggedly handsome, being angular, pointed and somewhat bony with a nose that was long and narrow, fleshy lips, and a prominent forehead. If his eyes hadn’t been so deeply set, he could’ve been described as being doe-eyed. His hair was quite long and curly; its raven matched that of his beard, which was luxuriant. Mine was well trimmed. But my mane was even longer than was Ezra’s. It was also wavy with hints of gold and copper in its sable. Beyond that, I was burly and fairly tall, though I felt somewhat short whenever I stood near Ezra. Most folks did. Even so, I not only served as his disciple, but also as his swordsworn. In such a capacity, I presided as the tactical commander of Orchard’s militia whereas Ezra reigned as its strategic commander. All of that was necessary due to bandits and marauders, as well as to the hordes of Kelmarri that had settled beyond the marshy floodplain extending along the far side of the Samarkhan River from the plantation. Of course, the Kelmarri had been forced to do so in reservations that had since become little more than vast ghettos. The closest of them was called Ghezareb. It was also the largest. Bands of its residents sometimes raided the plantation. That had much to do with why limestone walls extended around and inside much of Orchard. They remained more or less intact in most places. Some of their sections consisted of buildings of various description, including storehouses, homes, and shops. Blockhouses presided at Orchard’s outer corners, while a watchtower stood at her heart. Wrought of concrete, the latter was rather massive and quite tall, and it never went unmanned. If worst threatened to become even worse, it served as our fortress-of-last-resort. Beneath it spread a complex that formed an extensive safe bunker, which was well supplied. Across Orchard’s version of Main Street from the watchtower stood our roundhouse. Presently, everyone in Orchard, except the sentries on the tower, gathered in its central hall. We had done so to enjoy a feast and reminisce about our beloved matriarch, Shiharah Khazarial, whom we had just planted in the cemetery spreading into the woods beyond Orchard’s eastern gate.

         About an hour after the feast commenced, my communicator beeped. The person on the other end of the interruption informed me that rustlers were raiding the south pasture. That was not quite unexpected. During the past few years, we had suffered dozens of raids by rustlers. But there was one gang that had a knack for striking at the worst possible time. About once every three months, we herded chattel into our south pasture. We would then invite traders to come and bid on them. Afterward, they would use the docks in the south pasture to load their purchases onto their riverboats. Unfortunately, three out of the last ten times that we had herded chattel into the south pasture, the previously mentioned gang of rustlers had showed up to steal our chattel before we could sell them. Well organized and well armed, they suffered no compunction to killing our wranglers, shepherds, rangers, and herd dogs or my deputies.

         After discreetly letting Ezra know what was happening, I began casually rounding up my deputies. It just so happened that I served as the sheriff of the Sand Rose Plantation. I planned to let the rustlers escape with their prizes. The wranglers in charge of the herd being attacked and the rangers patrolling the pasture being raided had been ordered to put up just enough resistance to make it seem that they were serious about trying to stop the rustlers. Accordingly, my deputies and I would then follow them back to their base of operations and figure out what to do next. Just in case the rustlers managed to elude us, we had secretly implanted transponders in some of our chattel and horses. Such were activated just after I received the message concerning the rustlers.

         Altogether, I commanded eleven deputies. I only planned to take six with me. They included Ezra’s unmarried sisters, Taphir and Shitarah. Like him, they were tall and swarthy and had manes of raven. If they had been less shapely, they could’ve been considered lanky. As it was, though, they were doe-eyed delights. They were also sinewy and tough, my best deputies, in fact, as well as two of Orchard’s greatest warriors and hunters. Taphir piloted what we liked to call our cruiser, a speedcat which was almost massive enough to be called a giant. Just in case you don’t know, a speedcat is a hybrid that is part hydrofoil, part hoverboat, and part speedboat. Despite how large she was, our speedcat was exceedingly agile. Shitarah and I rode in her, while the remaining four members of our surveillance team kept up in a pair of hoverchariots.

         According to the wranglers and rangers who had skirmished with them, the rustlers had loaded our chattel into a hovership. They had then boarded several powerboats and a pair of fancopters. If we tried to chase them, they would just attack us, while the hovership got away. Then they would get away. Thus, we stayed several miles behind them and their hovership, while they headed down the Samarkhan River toward the lower side of Zebrekel. In that direction, the river waxed ever more crowded with boats and ships of all sorts. All that they seemed to be were constellations of lights and shadows. As they crept across what might have been a vast mirror, other constellations of lights and shadows migrated across the sky.

         None of us felt particularly happy about venturing ever deeper into Zebrekel’s sordid urbanscape of ghettoes, walled precincts, industrial complexes, commercial districts, malls, low-rises, high-rises, and skyscrapers. The only good thing about the jumbled, glittery vistas spreading away to either side of our journey into the heart of darkness was that the river happened to be several miles wide and sandwiched by floodplains of marshes and woods that were even wider in most places. Thus, other than bridges and railroad trestles, the city’s concrete, holosign, hustle-and-bustle malignancy never crept any closer to the repulsion and fascination of our fears than about four miles.

         Zebrekel’s lights bleached the heavens, while casting a strange twilight. It only became stranger after clouds filled the sky and drizzle started dampening everything. The air then became quite chilly. Though it remained still, it seemed to be a rather stout wind to my deputies and me, while we continued following the hovership and her escorts down the river more or less southward now and southeastward then. Eventually, the hovership and her escorts led us past the point where the Samarkhan merged with the Marakhan River. A few dozen miles farther downstream, their confluence widened into a lake lined by marshes here and combinations of wharves and piers there.

         Boat, ship, and barge traffic on the lake was even heavier that it had been on the river. That pleased us. For it meant that we could blend into the background without gathering any attention from either the rustlers or Zebrekel’s finest (or any other goons wearing badges). The portion of Zebrekel that we were trespassing in was a true police state. Realizing that we would be better off lightly armed if challenged by authorities, my deputies and I carried only pistols, shortswords, and daggers. Unless circumstances proved perfect, we planned to avoid confronting the rustlers and their cohorts. For the latter would probably turn out to be connected to some syndicate with no sense of humor.

         Our primary goal was to discover whom the rustlers were working for. If we succeeded, we might then be able to figure out who was passing information to them from within Orchard. We already had a few suspects in mind. To Taphir and Shitarah, determining their innocence or guilt was a highly personal matter. According to them, the suspects at the top of our list happened to be their brothers, Perez and Gomer. By the way, one of the other deputies with us was my brother, BC Caulder. We called him Bigger. Please, don’t ask why. I loved him, anyway.

         Nonetheless, the hovership and her escorts veered southwestward across the lake and soon entered a canal broad enough to pass for a river. Like the lake and the true river before it, such hosted much boat, ship, and barge traffic. By the time our speedcat joined their parade, the drizzle had become rain. Despite how miserable that made us, we were glad. For it made the chances of us being noticed by anyone less likely than ever.

         After cruising up the canal for a few dozen miles, the hoverboat and her escorts entered a canal of more modest proportions. Still fairly broad, that one wound its way southward for seventeen miles before widening into a hub basin nearly expansive enough to be considered a lake. Several other canals opened into such. The hovership and her escorts followed one of them away from it for about ten miles, then entered a node basin connected to two other canals. Somewhat vast, the basin was surrounded by expanses of warehouses, canneries, factories, and processing plants, separated by either woods or fields of weeds and junk. Fortunately, the boat, ship, and barge traffic plowing its sheen it was fairly heavy.

         Taphir parked our speedcat in the reeds hugging the fringes of some woods, while the hovership parked herself in a docking slot behind a warehouse nearly two miles away from our scrutiny. Shitarah then began recording evidence with a computerized, broad-spectrum holocamera designed for long-distance use at night in all sorts of conditions. Using videoptics binoculars, Taphir and I merely studied the vicinity of the hovership and the warehouse, while the rustlers began unloading the former. About a dozen figures from the warehouse helped them, while my deputies in the hoverchariots explored the area around their domain. They also recorded evidence with fancy holocameras.

         After enduring two hours of being drenched by cold rain and worrying about getting harassed by goons with badges, my deputies and I became quite anxious to head back to Orchard. Just as I was about to give the order that would send us on our way, we noticed the sweep of spotlights filtering through the nearby woods. Then we thought that we heard someone say something. As we peered through the rain toward the direction that the voice had apparently come from, a figure emerged from the woods, pleading. “Please, help me. They’re trying to kill me.” The figure then collapsed into the reeds behind the speedcat. Not knowing what else to do, my humanitarian instincts overrode all other programming in my psyche and prompted me to command Taphir to back the speedcat up so that Shitarah and I could rescue the poor stranger without getting any wetter than we already were. Once we dragged him onto her lower deck, we heard more voices approaching through the woods. I didn’t need to tell Taphir to get us moving away from their mischief as quickly as possible. A few moments after she sent our speedcat and us racing across the node basin, several figures emerged from the woods. I kept hoping that the spray of the speedcat’s splash tail would hide her name from them. It was emblazoned across her stern in yellow letters shining against the gloss of her midnight blue.

         Whoever the figures were, they began firing at us. Their bullets, fireslugs, and blaster bolts streaked just close enough to us to amplify our apprehension exponentially. Thanks to the rain and our excitement, none of us noticed that we entered the wrong canal. We then became thoroughly lost, which was probably good since no hostile parties ever challenged us. Still, it took most of the remainder of the night to guess our way back to the Samarkhan River and a homeward course. In the meantime, our passenger remained a mystery. He had no wallet or any other means of identification, except a pistol. Of course, he might have stolen it. But it was of a model of raid pistols issued by the Nezoid to its operatives. That organization happened to be our nation’s primary counterintelligence agency. It was known for its ruthless methods. Whenever it became a little too interested in anyone, they tended to either suffer a calamity or disappear in the middle of the night never to be seen again. Even so, the presence of our passenger posed an interesting problem. He remained unconscious, and so, could give us no account of himself and why he had been shot several times and stabbed once. Most of his wounds appeared to be superficial. A pair of head wounds, however, had been serious enough to cause severe concussions. At least, Shitarah thought so. I had no reason to doubt her since she was a medic both well trained and well experienced. Fortunately, the speedcat contained a sick bay stocked with all of the supplies and equipment that she needed to treat the stranger. I helped her.

         Just before we would’ve followed the Samarkhan River out of the effective jurisdiction of Zebrekel’s security forces, a turbocopter skycruiser challenged us. Taphir immediately halted our speedcat. As the skycruiser then hovered just above her aft deck, an officer clad in flexarmor of indigo with sliver trimmings climbed out of it. Doing my best to stay calm and seem friendly, I greeted him. He looked trigger-happy at first. Then after conversing with me for a few moments, he quit resting a hand on his pistol and became merely stiff and humorless. I produced enough ID material to convince him that I was who I claimed to be. Afterward, he inquired, “Did you receive permission to carry out operations in Zebrekel?”

         “No, sir,” I replied and offered him a cigarette, while preparing to light one for myself. He accepted. Then as he began savoring a prolonged puff, I told him, “Normally, I work with Major Phaeon Procopius. But there wasn’t time to navigate through channels and chase the rustlers, too.”

         “Major Procopius, huh?” The officer said, “That name brings back a few memories. He was my supervisor through my fledgling days in the Department. I kind of miss ol’ Buffalo.”

         “Buffalo? I thought his minions call him Thunderbird.”

         “Indeed, they do,” the officer said and puffed on his cigarette, then added, “You can hear that man talking from the far end of Central.”

         “His mouth definitely needs a volume control,” I chuckled.

         “So,” the officer asked, “did you manage to follow the rustlers to their base?”

         “As a matter of fact,” I boasted, “we ended up producing some dandy holomovies of them and their cohorts unloading their hovership into a warehouse.”

         Continuing to savor every puff of his cigarette, the officer went on to ask me various questions, including the location of the warehouse and the name of the hovership. Then he demanded to see a replay of the evidence. That, of course, required me to invite him onto the speedcat’s bridge and let him play around with Shitarah’s holocamera. Satisfied by what he watched in its viewfinder, he then insisted on inspecting the below-deck sections of the speedcat. That failed to surprise me even a little, but it did alarm me. After he peeked into the sickbay, he asked, “One of the rustlers, I presume.”

         As if I could only speak truth, I replied, “We thought that we ought to show him the hospitality of Orchard.”

         “Problems subduing him?”

         “A few.”

         “Well, since he isn’t complaining,” the officer said, “I suppose I shouldn’t stand in the way of his chance for a good time.”

         “I appreciate it, sir,” I remarked. “We’re a bit weary of losing profits, loved ones, friends, and neighbors to brigands.”

         “Personally,” the officer confided, “I wouldn’t see too great a problem if you showed all of that bastard’s associates and their colleagues a good time. Some thugs mixed up with river pirates and rustlers killed my brother last year, while he was investigating their activities around the East Bay Wharf District.”

         “Aw, man,” I said as if I gave a damn, “that’s awful. Hopefully, the assholes paid dearly for their sins.”

         “You could say that,” the officer remarked, leaving the impression that vengeance had been exacted on the sly. He then bothered Shitarah to produce some ID. As she complied, she followed Taphir’s example and flirted with him. Not surprisingly, he obtained her phone number…for official purposes, of course….

         By the time the officer and his skycruiser finally left us, we were almost too weary to enjoy our relief. Dawn had already arrived. Not spectacularly. Rain was pouring.

         Wasting no time, we resumed our retreat. A little over an hour later, we delivered our mysterious passenger to Orchard’s version of a hospital. As its doctors and nurses began tending to him, I used my communicator to contact two of the deputies who had stayed in town. After they arrived and accepted the challenge of watching over our mystery guest, Shitarah and I followed the examples of our fellow heroes and headed for bed….

         I snoozed until late afternoon. After gorging myself on my version of breakfast, which served as Ezra’s dinner, I ventured to the hospital to visit our living mystery. He had yet to awaken from his coma. The doctor in charge of his care, the gorgeous Ladonna, told me, “While we were examining him, we found something interesting. It’s a tattoo marking him not only as a Nezoid officer, but also as a member of the Black Guard.” The latter was the elite of the Nezoid’s paramilitary wing and suggested that our guest probably commanded a death-squad or something similar.

         “A tattoo? Are you sure?” I asked, while struggling to avoid talking to her tits. Fortunately, her eyes were radiant enough to hold my attention most of the time. Their blue was that of sapphires and their smile soothing. Most of her tresses shone golden; the rest were silvery. She kept them pulled back in a ponytail. I followed the taunts of her ass into the room confining the mystery guest. Pulling back the covers of his bed, she exposed his chest, which was hairless. Adorning its slow heaves was the likeness of a dragon, rendered in shades of iridescent blue and green. Next, Ladonna produced a pair of scanners. Holding one directly over the dragon tattoo, she pointed the other at it from an angle. I don’t know what either of them emitted. But a holographic tattoo appeared just above the dragon tattoo. Conspicuous in scarlet, it featured a pentagram blazing inside a circle around the image of crossing daggers. The glyphs accompanying them meant nothing to me. But the arcs of runes adorning the tattoo’s fringes spelled out “NEZOID” above and “THE ORDER OF THE BLACK GUARD” below.

         After studying the holographic tattoo for a long moment, I asked Ladonna, “Just how the heck did you know how to find it?”

         She smiled enigmatically.

         Recalling that she had a secret past that she had long been hiding from, I declined to pursue the subject at hand, while she changed it by stating the obvious, “It looks like you have some very interesting problems to puzzle over. My advice is going to sound strange, coming from a dedicated healer. But it might be prudent if you were to dump this gentleman in the middle of the wasteland before he wakes up. I can make sure that he won’t if you like. Because, if he wakes up and remembers who he is, then, well, you can worry about that.”

         Completing her thoughts, I asked rhetorically, “Is he a loyal officer of the Nezoid? Or was he branded a renegade or something even more radioactive?”

         “Maybe there was a power struggle, and he was one of the losers.”

        “Or maybe I merely fucked up big time,” I pointed out. “This guy is almost certainly a time bomb no matter what his particular truth turns out to be.”

         “Not to mention that he is probably a cold-blooded monster,” Ladonna said, while she and I studied his countenance. A bandage was wrapped around his crown, hiding the fact that his hair was light brown, short on the top and back, and even shorter on the sides. Cast with a ruddy complexion, his face was a bit boyish and normally naked. The neglect by anything resembling a razor had left several days of stubble darkening its puffy cheeks and cleft chin. Ladonna considered his face handsome. I thought that it almost looked goofy. Even so, both of us seriously considered making certain that our mystery guest never awoke. But we knew that Ezra would fail to appreciate that….

-2-

         I was in no hurry to report to Ezra about our mysterious guest. Ladonna had mentioned that she was due for a long lunch and that her husband, a wrangler, was somewhere near the north end of the plantation and not expected to return for several more days. She happened to be over a decade older than I was and well into middle age. But as I suggested, her charms remained quite enticing and she had a vibrant spirit. Besides, I missed enjoying her company. Several months had passed since the last time that I had helped her to explore the adventurous side of her nature. Thus, I accompanied her up to her apartment…A few hours later, I made my way home and found Ezra in his library, setting in front of his favorite computer. Since he was wrestling himself over what he should type next, I headed to the kitchen for a tankard of ale. Then I hunted for my favorite pipe.

         Ezra spent much of his time writing. The project presently challenging his creative and literary abilities was what he hoped would turn out to be an epic saga. Featuring heroes, villains, monsters, and strange lands, it was being written in a highly poetic style recalling the tales of the ancient bards of Sydonia and Abylonia. He had been working on it off and on for several years. Every time that he had resumed those efforts, he usually became grumpy. The present instance was no exception. But that was only partly due to the problems presented by the saga and its complexities. Weighing heavily on him were the problems revolving around our wonderful plantation, our beloved Orchard, our poor world, Carax, and our sorry nation, Kelmira.

         We who loved Ezra thought of him as the Prophet. He was truly a righteous man, like one of the prophet-patriarchs praised in the Yehodian Vedas. Unlike most people that I had ever met, he knew for certain that God exists. His faith was as solid as neutronium. Strange things happened around him much too frequently, and it seemed that he could force circumstances to yield to his determination more often than not. On several occasions, I had witnessed Ezra commanding the weather to obey him and it did. There were also incidences in which he commanded certain repugnant individuals to go to Hell, and within days, if not hours, they suddenly died. Two did so, while visiting hospitals for conditions unrelated to those that had killed them. But Ezra never exercised such powers frivolously. He did not necessarily even do so intentionally. But bad things usually happened to people that dared to provoke his indignation or whom he had taken a strong disliking to for some reason, none of which were ever petty. And though I was sometimes tempted to argue with his reasoning, I seldom bothered. For he usually proved correct in the long run. Even so, Ezra did his best to keep a tight reign on his temper. During the times at hand, however, doing so became increasingly more difficult not just for him, but for all of us who lived in Orchard.

         “I just heard from Poppy,” he announced. “The news is not good. Just as we figured, the government is lying about Mount Torranda. According to what Poppy says, that monster is getting closer and closer to a cataclysmic eruption, and as you know, she doesn’t BS.”

         The woman named Poppy was a volcanologist stationed in a volcanic range featuring eight of Carax’s most explosive continental volcanoes. Mount Torranda was the second largest of them. Concerning her, I asked, “How long before she blows her top?”

         “No more than four months,” Ezra replied, while leaning back in his swivel chair. “She might even erupt as early as late next month, and when she does, her tantrum will probably initiate an ice age, or at the very least, a significant cool down that will persist for years. According to Poppy, several of her sisters are poised to follow suit over the next two decades or so. There are also three maritime volcanoes of similar temperament that will probably explode sometime in the next half-century, and of course, who can forget about the Gormenean Caldera? It is showing signs of erupting sometime in the not-so-distant future, too. So, it is probably safe to say that, no matter what, our world is about to enter a glacial epoch sooner rather than later.”

         “Bummer.”

         “No kidding,” Ezra grumbled, then thought to ask, “What’s the scoop on our mystery guest?”

         “He’s still unconscious,” I replied, then hesitated to divulge, “It seems that he is not only a member of the Nezoid, but is also a Black Guard goon.”

         “Wonderful.”

         “Double fucking wonderful,” I added and sipped some ale. Then I asked, “What shall we do with him? Dump him in the desert, perhaps?”

         Ezra frowned, then sipped some tea and said, “We’ll wait until he wakes up and hear what he might have to say before we decide anything. In the meantime, see what your contacts in the ZPD (Zebrekel Police Department) have to say about the thugs attached to the warehouse [that you scoped out last night] and see if they mention anything about Nezoid activity in it vicinity. You might mention something about being challenged by heavy-handed agents of some sort.”

         “I had planned to,” I said. “The funny thing is that, if he were around, ol’ Turbo would probably know more than the badges do about such matters. He keeps up with everything going on near Wilmark Memorial.”

         Turbo was a shady entrepreneur and black market middleman who operated in the districts surrounding Zebrekel’s main spaceport. His real name was Amos Shamshona. He happened to be one of Ezra’s less reputable uncles. The youngest brother of Shiharah Khazarial, he would’ve attended her funeral despite the low opinion about him that she had long nourished. But he was off-world and out of touch. That was also true of her other brothers and sisters, most of whom had moved far away from our excuse for a nation, Kelmira. Nonetheless, one of the districts that Turbo was familiar with contained the warehouse that the rustlers had delivered our stolen chattel to.

         As Ezra crossed his arms, I could tell what he was thinking. He hoped that Turbo had nothing to do with the rustlers. That was my hope, too. Because, despite his being a slimy bastard, I liked him and hoped that it wouldn’t become necessary to shoot him or do anything else regrettable. Trying to distract myself from such thoughts, I asked, referring to our mystery guest, “So, what’ll we do if some Nezoid agents show up, looking for him?”

         “We’ll wait to cross that bridge,” Ezra replied and sipped some tea, while I loaded my long-stemmed pipe. “For, now, we’ll treat him to all of our hospitality as if he were a saint.” He neglected to mention that, from then on, we would be extra nosy regarding every stranger who visited Orchard. Unless things changed drastically, that wouldn’t be too difficult. For no more than a handful of outsiders entered our utopia on any given day and most of them just passed through her, not bothering to stop even at our service station or the café next door….

         Ezra and I continued discussing various matters for another hour or so. Then we prepared ourselves for the evening’s festivities. Most folks in Orchard were planning to celebrate the inauguration of his reign as our patriarch. Before I tell you about what happened during that excuse to get drunk and high, and carry on like fools, I would like to tell you more about the House of Khazarial, the Sand Rose Plantation, Orchard, and the situations threatening them.

         Like most others in the region, our plantation was mostly a ranch. Its three-quarters of a million acres represented but a fraction of its original vastness. Though its size may sound impressive, most of it spread across a rangeland of tall-grass steppe, chaparral, scrub woods, gullies, and pond-dotted moors, many of which were more or less brackish. But its greenery provided enough nourishment to keep the bellies of all sorts of chattel happy, as well as the bellies of various wild beasts. From them we derived most of our profits, along with an ample supply of meat, hides, wool, and milk. We reaped almost all of our remaining profits from various crops, which also provided plenty of food, smoking material, and assorted other things. The several thousand acres devoted to their proliferation occupied the portions of the plantation extending around much of what we referred to as the Island. Located near the southern end of the plantation, such was isolated by the murk and turbulence of the Samarkhan River to the east and by a network of canals along all other sides. Orchard presided at its heart. By the way, the river bordered the plantation’s eastern and northern extremes, while a vast, marshy floodplain curved around its western fringes. The Azarkhan River, in turn, wound around the plantation’s southwestern edges. At the southernmost point of the plantation, the slog of the Azarkhan’s soapy green merged with the currents of the Samarkhan, which were usually stained yellowish.

         Oh, my beloved Orchard. I wish she could’ve continued forever and that I had never needed to leave her. She really wasn’t much of a town by most folks’ standards. But she had everything that I wanted in a community. Originally, she had been the plantation’s central compound. In such, the plantation’s masters and many of their vassals and slaves had dwelled together in harmony and a pleasing semblance of equality. From the beginning, the members of the House of Khazarial had practiced a tradition whereby they treated their vassals and slaves with dignity and respect, and shared both the bounty of the plantation and its profits with them. They never tried to impose their religion, Yehodaism, upon them or anyone else. Neither did they ever try to prevent any of them from practicing their own religions, many of which were pagan. More than a few members of the House of Khazarial even ended up marrying either vassals or slaves. In most cases, they did so without fearing condemnation from the remaining members of their clan.

         During the early days, there had been many plantations in the region and very little of anything else representing civilization, except trading centers and fishing villages, and none of them had been very impressive. That remained true for well over a thousand years. Then the masters of the Darsythian Republic got much too drunk and high and decided to turn our world, Carax, into a giant real-estate development. At the time, the Plains of Megillah had hosted well over three hundred plantations. Until then, their denizens had to contend with interminable droughts and endless rainy seasons, cyclones, dust storms, blizzards, grass fires, deluges, hail tempests, marauders, rustlers, all sorts of predators, and our world’s natives whom we lumped together as the despicable Kelmarri. They were mutants just closely enough kin to humans to mate with successfully only to produce sterile hybrids. Well, they and the other problems that I mentioned continued being problems after the newcomers began arriving and messing things up with the ever greater and more insidious demands of their precious progress. Escalating taxes were among the more noxious demands in question.

         One of the results of all of the dubious blessings bestowed by progress was the gradual decline and eventual demise of most of the plantations. By the time that Orchard and the Sand Rose Plantation entered their final days, there were only a few dozen other plantations left in our region. They were in their last days, too. My master, Ezra Khazarial, had prophesied that outcome when he was still a child. Since then, he had predicted many other things, more than a few of which had come true long before we buried his mother. Some of the most beautiful and ugliest of his remaining prophecies foretold events and developments that lurked in our near future, including the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Torranda. I dreaded encountering the truths looming within that one or any of the other ugly ones. In a way, I had been preparing for them all of my life. To do so, I had followed a double path. One had led to me becoming a knight; the other challenged me to become a worthy disciple of Ezra. In some ways, I failed miserably at the latter. That would impact how things turned out in general and between us in particular.

         To a large degree, Orchard had become less a town than a patch of woods. Only a few of the trees in her were very tall. That was true of those outside her, too. Winter had reduced most of them to skeletons. But even the evergreens were scraggily. The wind had much to do with that. It almost never stopped blowing and was usually quite blustery no matter what season was at hand. Even so, Orchard sprawled across hundreds of acres and had scores of occupied buildings and dozens of others that remained unoccupied. They were composed of limestone. Many had flat roofs; the remainder were crowned by roofs of sheetmetal. Few in either case were apparent from very far beyond her main street—the only one that was paved. It was part of a highway that entered Orchard from the south and exited her north side. In the former direction were a forge, a cannery, a factory and a refinery, all of which had been abandoned for nearly two decades. To the north were two more factories and another refinery, as well as a smelting plant and a slaughterhouse combined with a meat packing plant. They had also been abandoned for nearly two decades, if not longer. By the way, in that same direction stood a trio of grain dryers. We denizens of Orchard owned and still used them.

         Nonetheless, to pay off various taxes and to make certain that future ones could be paid, the plantation’s masters had leased the land to the companies and corporations that had installed the industrial monstrosities that were presently being taken over by woods. To accommodate the needs and desires of their personnel and visitors, the masters of the plantation had then built assorted structures along Orchard’s main street or nearby such, which became all sorts of businesses from cafes, shops, parlors, and banks to hash taverns, dance halls, service stations, hotels, and apartments. Leasing them to entrepreneurs had proved quite profitable for well over a century. Then Carax and the remainder of Kelmira had suffered the throes of a regional depression, which the present galactic depression rendered much deeper and darker. And so, the good times had ended.

         I first become acquainted with Orchard just as her bawdy days were becoming a legend of countless tales retold by Orchard’s old timers. My oldest brothers and some of their buddies had brought me with them from a neighboring plantation, while they ventured to the last of Orchard’s bordellos to sample the fruits of its finest ladies. They even paid for me to have a little fun. It was my first experience with a woman or any other kind of female. She was so taken by my boyish charms that she kept exciting me until we had made love three times, only the last of which amounted to anything worth remembering.

         Anyway, to accommodate the factories, refineries, and such, a pair of railroad spurs had been extended through Orchard more or less parallel to her main street. Each spur consisted of twin railroad tracks. Because they no longer served any greater purpose, the railroad companies of Carax stored extra engines, boxcars, tank cars, hopper cars, stockcars, and flatcars on them within Orchard. They provided endless hours of fun for the children of Orchard, playing hide-and-seek. Of course, Orchard’s many empty buildings did so, too. If she had still been thriving, several thousand folks could have lived in her. As it was, she provided homes for only a little over nine hundred adults and nearly half as many children. Like me, many of her inhabitants were refugees from plantations that no longer existed. In such, we had served as vassals and slaves. Within Orchard, we relished our roles as members of the clan—the House of Khazarial. Ours was the perfect balance between being communal creatures and free spirits. In no small way, Ezra had become our slave. He had been training for his position on our throne since before he stopped being a wild man and accepted his destiny. That was just before I joined his cause and became his first disciple and only swordsworn.

         The contentment of us denizens of Orchard was partly due to the reality of our poor world. She was the best place to live that we knew of on Carax or anywhere else in Kelmira. Our nation was schizophrenic. Much of it was little more than so many police states surrounded by states of anarchy or something similar. Our stronghold of sanity and the remainder of our enchanted domain were situated within the fringes of a lawless zone. Dotted by other enclaves of sanity, its brutal uncertainties extended for thousands of miles to the southwest, west, and north, but only about a dozen miles eastward. Beyond the latter, a zone of near anarchy blended with the frontier of a police state—the previously mentioned city of Zebrekel. She was the queen of a megalopolis extending several hundred miles to the south and nearly two hundred miles southeastward, while stretching nearly a thousand miles to the east and northeast. The population of that urban jigsaw puzzle was estimated to be nearly two billion. Its lights bleached the eastern sky of Orchard’s nights dingy nearly halfway up to the zenith.

         Nonetheless, we who loved Orchard mostly appreciated our abundance of food and smoking herbs, which we grew. We also appreciated our abundance of beer, ale, and mead, which we brewed. As it was, we also generated our own power and made our own soap, most of our medicines, and many of our clothes, including our boots and hats. Not to brag, but we were self-sufficient in most other ways, too. Despite how content that helped us feel most of the time, our neofeudal utopia had been gradually losing members for well over a decade. For she had become a testing ground, refining our company with her challenges and lack of this or that excess offered by more complicated varieties of civilization. In the process, the weak were being eliminated, leaving only the toughest and the best, which hardship was continually forging into better and stronger individuals. Most of us realized that we were essentially enduring basic training for our roles in the coming struggle between the forces of good and evil in known space. To be sure, we had no doubt that a galactic war was only a few years away at most. But we had yet to figure exactly where in the great scheme of things any of us would fit. Only a few sensed that we would soon find out. Before then, though, much would happen, and we would be further tested. Presently, the stresses of our existence prepared to push more of us over the edge and out of our equation of worthiness. Those who would lose heart and decide to hunt better times elsewhere joined most of the remainder of us in the roundhouse the evening after the feast to remember our beloved matriarch, Shiharah Khazarial. The only members of our brotherhood/sisterhood not present were the sentries on the watchtower, the guardians and other inhabitants of our outer fortresses, the rangers patrolling the far edges of our domain, and the wranglers and shepherds out tending to our herds and flocks. Nonetheless, on the occasion at hand, we gathered to inaugurate my master’s reign as our patriarch. Those of us who fancied themselves musicians conjured merry music, while the remainder of us snacked, drank, toked, danced, joked, and frolicked. Few of us, however, managed to revel more than a few laughs ahead of our cares. Then we noticed the alarm lights flashing around the heights of the roundhouse. The music and clamor of our fun instantly faded, and we heard the clangs of the bells atop the watchtower announcing the imminent arrival of trouble. Out of Orchard’s PA system then spilled the voice of one of the sentries shouting, “Marauders coming in fast from the north. They appear to be from the Red Dragon Tribe.” That was the old good-news/bad-news routine, meaning that we had dealt with the reapers of the Red Dragon Tribe many times before and come to