Interlude the Second
Jedi Sentinel: Cult of Fear
Auspicious Gloam clambered over a hill of rubble that had once been a tranquil, tree-lined boulevard. In better days, he would’ve strolled down the cobblestones, hands in his pockets, without a care in the world. Now, he had to claw his way over every jagged, misshapen hill, streaking them with blood from his hands and feet. The rest of the city had fared no better; once stately towers and homes had been battered, toppled as if by some chthonic deity’s apocalyptic tantrum.
It was night and both moons were waning, but the things hunting Gloam did not need light to see. They crept through the ragged holes and vacant windows of the ruins all around him. Their long limbs, thin as twigs, skittered from one shadow to the next, like insects. Their pinprick eyes glittered at the bottoms of deep, hollow sockets, never resting. The new denizens of Gloam’s city were incapable of rest.
They’d pursued him across every square meter of this morbid deathscape, enough times that Gloam could also navigate it in the dark. And then countless times more. He could run for his life through the charcoal husks of fallen trees without breaking a branch. He could scale the last intact wall of the Grand Cathedral without a slip or scrape.
The only thing he could not do, even after all this time, was escape. Sooner or later, they always caught him. A bony claw took his ankle or caught his shoulder or latched around his throat, and then they would be upon him like starving hounds.
On this particular night, an elderly woman with an unhinged jaw was waiting for him under the rubble. She clutched his wrist like a snare trap and dragged him down, knocking his head against the bricks. Blood filled his mouth, his vision. Her breath was on his face, empty of words but full of malice.
She did not bite or maim him. They never did. Their intentions for Gloam were far, far worse. When her words finally came, they were dry as an autumn wind and instantly joined by others. They melted from the darkness like vengeful ghosts.
“You did this,” they accused.
“These are the ashes of your failure.”
“We lost everything, because of you!”
“We died because of you!”
“Your fault!”
“Your failure!!!”
He wiped the blood from his eyes and opened them to blinding daylight. And silence. His persecutors had vanished, along with the hill of rubble. Leafy, green trees reached longingly over his head to touch their fellows on either side of the street. Gloam felt for them. Spires and arches and gleaming domes towered over them like monuments.
Only the people were missing. Not just the gaunt, degenerate survivors from the nighttime city, but the people he remembered, the people who’d left their meals half-eaten on cafe tables or dropped their bags in the middle of the street, as if they’d vanished between one footstep and the next. He was alone, again, and he wept.
At some point — could have been hours or months; the sun never strayed from noon — Gloam became aware that someone else was screaming. It was distant, but persistent, like something rousing him from slumber.
Jarringly, he realized that he was sitting in a dark cave, breathing the atomized remains of his city. Concrete and metal, ash and bone, pulverized to dust. It filtered through the groundwater and formed large, black crystals down here in the depths.
Gloam had never encountered anyone else here in the cave, only the apparitions in the nighttime city. Was this some new form of penance? New voices to remind him of his sins? If so, he could not understand what they had to say, but he went in search of them anyway.
Crawling over the uneven ground, his hands now cut and bleeding for real, Gloam found the interlopers writhing on the ground near a collapsed wall. Tiny, electric lights lay on the ground with them, the first real light to strike Gloam’s eyes in a very long time. He squeezed them shut against the pain.
There were three of them in total, each a different species. Gloam groped his way to the first, a young man that could have been a resident of his own planet, if not for his copper-colored hair. Gloam checked his vitals by touching one hand to his forehead, a finger or thumb on each temple.
To his surprise, he could sense much more than the stranger’s breathing and heartbeat. He could feel the man’s fear; it flashed across his brain and down his spine, coursed through his limbs like lightning. The sensation was unfamiliar to Gloam, long since estranged from him. He’d crossed over to the place beyond fear, a barren terrain of numb despair.
This, he shared with the stranger and, somehow, his agony subsided. He ceased his thrashing and opened his eyes. A smile spread across his face, then tears. He grabbed Gloam’s hand and kissed it. Gloam snapped it back and attended to the others with similar results.
They thanked him for what seemed like forever, all in the same unfamiliar language. They may have wanted their savior to follow them back to the surface, but Gloam grew weary of them and turned his back, returning to his spot in the darkness and meditated. Eventually, they left.
Days later, one of the young men returned to Gloam’s cave with a remarkable, mechanical man… or most of one. He’d apparently left its limbs and lower torso on the surface, slinging the rest across his back for the climb.
He hugged Gloam like an old friend, an unsettling turn of events that Gloam brushed off as a foreign custom before sitting down next to the automaton. It regarded him with its round, glowing eyes and greeted him in several languages, each a little more intelligible than the last. At length, they worked out a crude pidgin dialect.
“A pleasure to meet you, sir.” The tin man’s accent was atrocious, and some of his grammatical choices bewildering, but Gloam could make it work. “I am BT-W, corporate labor relations. Master Brigg has… requested that I come all the way down here, despite the clear risk to my personal safety, not to mention my partial disassembly, to establish a line of communication with you. Is this agreeable to you?”
Maybe this wasn’t a vision, after all. “I am Auspicious Gloam,” he croaked. It was a strange sensation, speaking his own name. He hadn’t realized he missed it. “How did you survive the attack? It’s been so long, I thought I was the last of us. How many others are there?”
The automaton and the young man had a strained conversation. “I’m afraid we’re confused, Master Gloam. Survivors of what? This planet has been uninhabited for as long as we have records. Thousands of years.”
Impossible! This couldn’t be real. It must be the cave, tempting him with hope. “Then how did you come to be here?!” he demanded, voice cracking.
“We were brought here by Management, of course,” BT-W responded without consulting his master.
“On another generation ship?”
“Heavens, no! Through hyperspace, sir. Generation ships haven’t seen widespread use in, well, generations. Are you certain you’re alright? The particulate count down here is dangerously high. We could summon medical — “ Brigg kicked his automaton reproachfully and another terse conversation ensued.
“How rude,” the tin man complained. “Master Brigg would like to know — and I’m paraphrasing, as he uses entirely too many expletives — if you could… ‘treat’ him again, like you did the other day. I’m afraid I don’t know what he means, sir.”
Honestly, Gloam didn’t quite know, either. Whatever he did, he’d done it by instinct. He didn’t want to make any empty promises, but there was no harm in trying. “I’ll do what I can, but first… I want to know what the cave showed him. In his visions, before I ‘treated’ him. Did he see a dead city?”
The young man went on at length, but the translator said simply, “He saw himself as an old man, dying penniless and alone. Not really going out on a limb with that prediction, is he?”
So, the cave didn’t show everyone the same thing. Interesting. It meant that the torment it had heaped on Gloam for all these years — millennia?! — was meant for him alone. Maybe it had all come from within him, his own guilt and shame. Maybe the dead weren’t actually angry with him.
Maybe they were just dead.
This changed everything. “Tell him to lie down and close his eyes,” Gloam instructed BT-W. Brigg settled into the dust and dutifully closed his eyes, but did nothing to keep the dopey, self-satisfied grin from his face. Gloam touched his temples once again and felt that fire burning in his mind. Less than it had been, but hot nonetheless. He met it with his own numbness and the fire was instantly extinguished. If there was any exchange in the other direction, it was imperceptible to Gloam, like trying to melt a glacier with a candle.
Brig was crying. His joyful sobs echoed off the crystal walls; it seemed somehow sacrilegious.
“He thanks you,” the tin man reported, “and quite effusively, I might add. Embarrassingly so. I’ll spare you the details.”
“What’s it like,” Gloam asked softly, “on the surface? Is it anything like it was: rolling hills, temperate forests? Has nature recovered?”
“Yes and no,” the translator replied before passing the query along. “Master Brigg calls it a tropical paradise, sir. Apologies for the cliche. He says it’s a beautiful ocean world dotted with tiny islands, thick jungles, and beautiful beaches. He used the word ‘beautiful’ twice,” the tin man tsk’d.
An ocean world! It really had been millenia. How was he still alive? Did the cave want to torture him forever? Or had it just kept him alive and Gloam used that immortality to torture himself? What a waste!
“Master Brigg adds that the mining company is deforesting the planet. That’s a bit alarmist. Our mutual employer operates in full compliance with all relevant legal and — Yes, yes. No ad libbing. Master Brigg would like to report that the company lured him and the other miners here — his words, not mine — with promises of land on a pristine world, but they make the workers pay for everything: transit, food, lodging, equipment, uniforms, even medical attention. That’s all true, but their employment contracts are very clear about financing.
“Anyway, he says meeting you down here was the first good thing that’s happened to him on this rock, maybe his entire life. Well, that’s heartwarming. Who knew the dirty lout had it in him? Oh, and he would like you to join him on the surface. He says he’s worried about your health and rightly so. The particulate count in this cave is well outside recommended levels.”
There it was again, the terrible temptation of hope. If this was just another trick of the cave’s, he had no choice but to let it play out. And on the off chance this was real, maybe he could do some good. “I’d be happy to accept this invitation,” Gloam told the tin man, “and please assure Master Brigg that I’m going to help him, all of them. I know how to get them what they were promised.”
It was all true. All of it. The planet had been flooded, turning his forested plains into shallow seas. It was warm, too warm, and steamy jungles had overtaken what little land remained. And when did birds take over? Where were the big cats and scurrying rodents and majestic deer? And when did the mighty, wholly elephants become tree-climbing, tiptoeing shrews?!
The miners were camped out in the alien weapon’s impact crater, a gargantuan pile of debris that squatted on the grave of his city. A rail system led hovering carts of material up the slope and through a fissure in the crater’s ridge, where strange ships waited to receive them. Gloam didn’t know where they could be going, in ships that small, unless there was a larger starship waiting in orbit. But maybe they tunneled through this ‘hyperspace’ the tin man had mentioned.
Speaking of which, the encampment was crawling with automatons! There were stick men with long, narrow heads; short, squat machines rolling around on wheels; and inscrutable, headless monstrosities with too many insect legs and beady, blinking lights. With all this automation, Gloam wondered what need the company had for human labor.
No matter. He was here to put a stop to it.
Brigg guided him to an unassuming door toward the back of the camp, near the crater wall. “This is the site foreman’s office,” the translator offered helpfully. “A joy to work for. Has an open door policy.” Brigg waved some kind of identification in front of a sensor, which changed color before the door hissed open. “Figuratively speaking, of course.”
The office inside was a breeding ground for imported luxuries. Thick rugs on the floor, a thin haze of hookah smoke, an ornately decorated desk and plush furniture in every corner, even a little artwork here and there. One entire wall had been colonized by spirituous beverages, backlit in purple and chaperoned by two crystal glasses, indicated an inclination to share… but not too much.
The foreman himself was a substantial fellow. His shoulders were thick with muscle, alluding to his working past, but the thickness in his midsection was more recent, from the comforts of a managerial position. His hair descended either side of his face in big, bushy masses that ended abruptly at his chin. His clothes looked expensive, but threadbare: boots of scuffed leather and an embroidered vest over a once-white shirt, now yellowed around the collar.
He and Brigg exchanged angry words. BT-W did not bother to translate, but Gloam imagined they were of this sort: ‘What the fresh hell do you want?’ and ‘What we were promised!’ and ‘Get back to work, you useless grunt!’ Gloam decided to cut short the formalities by walking right up to the furry tyrant and blowing a pinch of cave dust in his face.
The reaction was immediate. The foreman’s eyes dilated and began darting around as if dreaming, but his eyelids were wide open. His body went rigid before falling over and bouncing off his desk. Then, the seizures and screaming began.
Gloam touched his temples and shared his great, cold numbness with the poor wreck. Moments later, he was relaxed and regaining consciousness. Gloam gestured for Brigg to bring his automaton over. “Oh my! What have you made me an accessory to? This behavior is clearly forbidden by corporate policy, not to mention my programming.” Brigg kicked it and the automaton relented. “What is your bidding, Master Gloam?”
“Tell your foreman that I have freed him from fear. Now, he must free the workers and give them what they were promised.”
Words were exchanged. The foreman had tears in his eyes; he didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Brigg was all but dancing with excitement, but the foreman must have said something disappointing. Gloam got another pinch of the black chalk ready.
“The foreman rightly points out that he does not have the authority to do as you request,” BT-W explained, “but he is thankful for what you’ve done and suggests that he can call the mine owner here to negotiate a settlement.”
“See that he does,” Gloam decreed, walking behind the foreman’s desk and sitting in his chair. He took a long draw off the man’s hookah. My, how he’d missed the world. “Bring him before me and I’ll set him free, as well.
“I’ll set everyone free.”
Written by Daniel Bayn
Cover image by Midjourney
